Cobb's  ^4 n  atomy 

By 

Irvin  S.  Cobb 

Author  of  "Back  Home" 

Illustrated  by  Peter  Newell 


New  . 

George  H.  Doran  Company 


COPYRIGHT.  1912, 
Hv  I  HI   CURTIS  PUBLISHING  COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT.  I'M.'. 

BY   (iK)H(ii:    H.    I),  IRAN    COMPANY 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


To 

G.  H.  L. 

WHO  STOOD  GODFATHER 
TO  THESE  CONTENTS 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


PREFACE 


This  Space  To-Let  to  Any  Reputable 

Party  Desiring  a  Good 

Preface 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

I.    TUMMIES 3 

II.    TEETH 33 

III.  HAIR 69 

IV.  HANDS  AND  FEET  ,  107 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 

"Does  he  have  to  take  the  tailor's  word  for  it  that 
his  trousers  need  pressing?" 5 

"Not  in  these  times  when  dancing  is  a  cross  be 
tween  a  wrestling  match,  a  contortion  act  and  a 
trip  on  a  roller-coaster." 25 

"Cut  them  with  some  such  mussy  thing  as  the 
horny  part  of  a  nurse's  thumb.". 37 

"And  our  face  folds  up  on  us  like  a  crush  hat  or  a 
concertina." 41 

"Ponto  came  out  .  .  .  and  bit  him  severely  in 
the  calf  of  the  leg." 45 

"Listening  for  the  footfalls  of  a  dread  apparition."     49 

"At  this  moment  the  dog  trees  the  woodchuck  at 
the  base  of  that  cherished  tooth." 53 

"It  takes  a  fond  and  doting  parent  to  detect  evi 
dences  of  an  actual  human  aspect  in  us." 73 

"While  I  stood  admiringly  by  and  watched  the 
long  yellow  curls  fall  writhing  upon  the  floor.". .  79 

"The  way  she  carried  on  was  scandalous  and  ill- 
timed."  .  83 


Cob  IS  s  Anatomy 


ILL  USTRA  riONS—  Continued 


PAGE 

"Every  face  fell  into  one  of  three  classes,  it  being 
either  a  square,  a  round  or  a  squirrel." 89 

"When  my  back  is  turned  he  grabs  up  his  powder 
swab  and  makes  a  quick  swoop  upon  me." 97 

"There'd  be  twice  as  many  hands  to  wash  when 
company  was  coming  to  dinner." 1 1 1 

"The  presence  of  a  soiled  rag  round  a  finger  gives 
to  a  boy's  hand  a  touch  of  distinctiveness." 1 15 

"These  gifted  mortals  are  not  common." 1 19 

"We  don't  know  what  to  do  with  our  hands.".  .  .    123 

"I  don't  think  I've  seen  a  jumpman's  nails  in  such 
a  state  for  ever  so  long." 129 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


TUMMIES 


Gobb's  Anatomy 


Tummies 

DR.  WOODS  HUTCHINSON  says 
that  fat  people  are  happier  than 
other  people.  How  does  Dr. 
Woods  Hutchinson  know?  Did  he  ever 
have  to  leave  the  two  top  buttons  of  his  vest 
unfastened  on  account  of  his  extra  chins? 
Has  the  pressure  from  within  against  the 
waistband  where  the  watchfob  is  located 
ever  been  so  great  in  his  case  that  he  had 
partially  to  undress  himself  to  find  out  what 
time  it  was?  Does  he  have  to  take  the 
tailor's  word  for  it  that  his  trousers  need 
pressing? 

He  does  not.  And  that  sort  of  a  remark 
is  only  what  might  be  expected  from  any 
person  upward  of  seven  feet  tall  and  weigh 
ing  about  ninety-eight  pounds  with  his 
heavy  underwear  on.  I  shall  freely  take 
Dr.  Woods  Hutchinson's  statements  on  the 


Cobles  A '  tu 


joys  and  ills  of  the  thin.  But  when  he  un 
dertakes  to  tell  me  that  fat  people  are  hap 
pier  than  thin  people,  it  is  only  hearsay 
evidence  with  him  and  I  decline  to  accept 
his  statements  unchallenged.  He  is  going 
outside  of  his  class.  He  is,  as  you  might 
say,  no  more  than  an  innocent  bystander. 
Whereas  I  am  a  qualified  authority. 

I  will  admit  that  at  one  stage  of  my  life, 
I  regarded  fleshiness  as  a  desirable  asset. 
The  incident  came  about  in  this  way.  There 
was  a  circus  showing  in  our  town  and  a 
number  of  us  proposed  to  attend  it.  It  was 
one  of  those  one-ring,  ten-cent  circuses  that 
used  to  go  about  over  the  country,  and  it  is 
my  present  recollection  that  all  of  us  had 
funds  laid  by  sufficient  to  buy  tickets;  but 
if  we  could  procure  admission  in  the  regu 
lar  way  we  felt  it  would  be  a  sinful  waste  of 
money  to  pay  our  way  in. 

With  this  idea  in  mind  we  went  scouting 
round  back  of  the  main  tent  to  a  compara 
tively  secluded  spot,  and  there  we  found  a 
place  where  the  canvas  side-wall  lifted  clear 
of  the  earth  for  a  matter  of  four  or  five 
inches.  We  held  an  informal  caucus  to 


"DOES  HE  HAVE  TO  TAKE  THE  TAILOR'S  WORD  FOR  IT 
THAT  HIS  TROUSERS  NEED  PRESSING  ?  " 


Tummies  7 


decide  who  should  go  first.  The  honor  lay 
between  two  of  us — between  the  present 
writer,  who  was  reasonably  skinny,  and  an 
other  boy,  named  Thompson,  who  was  even 
skinnier.  He  won,  as  the  saying  is,  on  form. 
It  was  decided  by  practically  a  unanimous 
vote,  he  alone  dissenting,  that  he  should 
crawl  under  and  see  how  the  land  lay  inside. 
If  everything  was  all  right  he  would  make 
it  known  by  certain  signals  and  we  would 
then  follow,  one  by  one. 

Two  of  us  lifted  the  canvas  very  gently 
and  this  Thompson  boy  started  to  wriggle 
under.  He  was  about  halfway  in  when — zip ! 
— like  a  flash  he  bodily  vanished.  He  was 
gone,  leaving  only  the  marks  where  his  toes 
had  gouged  the  soil.  Startled,  we  looked 
at  one  another.  There  was  something  pe 
culiar  about  this.  Here  was  a  boy  who  had 
started  into  a  circus  tent  in  a  circumspect, 
indeed,  a  highly  cautious  manner,  and  then 
finished  the  trip  with  undue  and  sudden 
precipitancy.  It  was  more  than  peculiar- 
it  bordered  upon  the  uncanny.  It  was  sin 
ister.  Without  a  word  having  been  spoken 
we  decided  to  go  away  from  there. 


8          Cobles  Anatowy 

Wearing  expressions  of  intense  uncon 
cern  and  sterling  innocence  upon  our  young 
faces  we  did  go  away  from  there  and  drifted 
back  in  the  general  direction  of  the  main 
entrance.  We  arrived  just  in  time  to  meet 
our  young  friend  coming  out.  He  came 
hurriedly,  using  his  hands  and  his  feet  both, 
his  feet  for  traveling  and  his  hands  for  rub 
bing  purposes.  Immediately  behind  him 
was  a  large,  coarse  man  using  language  that 
stamped  him  as  a  man  who  had  outgrown 
the  spirit  of  youth  and  was  preeminently 
out  of  touch  with  the  ideals  and  aims  of  boy 
hood. 

At  that  period  it  seemed  to  me  and  to  the 
Thompson  boy,  who  was  moved  to  speak 
feelingly  on  the  subject,  and  in  fact  to  all  of 
us,  that  excessive  slimness  might  have  its 
drawbacks.  Since  that  time  several  of  us 
have  had  occasion  to  change  our  minds. 
With  the  passage  of  years  we  have  freshened 
up,  and  now  we  know  better.  The  last  time 
I  saw  the  Thompson  boy  he  was  known  as 
Excess-Baggage  Thompson.  His  figure  in 
profile  suggested  a  man  carrying  a  roll-top 
desk  in  his  arms  and  his  face  looked  like  a 


Tummies  9 


face  that  had  refused  to  jell  and  was  about 
to  run  down  on  his  clothes.  He  spoke  long 
ingly  of  the  days  of  his  youth  and  wondered 
if  the  shape  of  his  knees  had  changed  much 
since  the  last  time  he  saw  them. 

Yes  sir,  no  matter  what  Doctor  Hutch- 
inson  says,  I  contend  that  the  slim  man  has 
all  the  best  of  it  in  this  world.  The  fat  man 
is  the  universal  goat;  he  is  humanity's  stand 
ing  joke.  Stomachs  are  the  curse  of  our 
modern  civilization.  When  a  man  gets  a 
stomach  his  troubles  begin.  If  you  doubt 
this  ask  any  fat  man — I  started  to  say.  ask 
any  fat  woman,  too.  Only  there  aren't  any 
fat  women  to  speak  of.  There  are  women 
who  are  plump  and  will  admit  it;  there  are 
even  women  who  are  inclined  to  be  stout. 
But  outside  of  dime  museums  there  are  no 
fat  women.  But  there  are  plenty  of  fat  men. 
Ask  one  of  them.  Ask  any  one  of  them. 
Ask  me. 

This  thing  of  acquiring  a  tummy  steals 
on  one  insidiously,  like  a  thief  in  the  night. 
You  notice  that  you  are  plumping  out  a 
trifle  and  for  the  time  being  you  feel  a  sort 
of  small  personal  satisfaction  in  it.  Your 


10         Co/>/>  '.v    ,  huitonty 

shirts  fit  you  better.  You  love  the  slight 
strain  upon  the  buttonholes.  You  admire 
the  pleasant  plunking  sound  suggestive  of 
ripe  watermelons  when  you  pat  yourself. 
Then  a  day  comes  when  the  persuasive  odor 
of  mothballs  fills  the  autumnal  air  and 
everybody  at  the  barber  shop  is  having  the 
back  of  his  neck  shaved  also,  thus  betoken 
ing  awakened  social  activities,  and  when 
evening  is  at  hand  you  take  the  dress-suit, 
which  fitted  you  so  well,  out  of  the  closet 
where  it  has  been  hanging  and  undertake 
to  back  yourself  into  it.  You  are  pained  to 
learn  that  it  is  about  three  sizes  too  small. 
At  first  you  are  inclined  to  blame  the  suit 
for  shrinking,  but  second  thought  convinces 
you  that  the  fault  lies  elsewhere.  It  is  you 
that  have  swollen,  not  the  suit  that  has 
shrunk.  The  buttons  that  should  adorn  the 
front  of  the  coat  are  now  plainly  visible 
from  the  rear. 

You  buy  another  dress-suit  and  next  fall 
you  have  out-grown  that  one  too.  You  pant 
like  a  lizard  when  you  run  to  catch  a  car. 
You  cross  your  legs  and  have  to  hold  the 
crossed  one  on  with  both  hands  to  keep  your 


Tummies  11 


stomach  from  shoving  it  off  in  space.  After- 
awhile  you  quit  crossing  them  and  are  con 
tent  with  dawdling  yourself  on  your  own 
lap.  You  are  fat!  Dog-gone  it — you  are 
fat! 

You  are  up  against  it  and  it  is  up  against 
you,  which  is  worse.  You  are  something  for 
people  to  laugh  at.  You  are  also  expected 
to  laugh.  It  is  all  right  for  a  thin  man  to 
be  grouchy;  people  will  say  the  poor  crea 
ture  has  dyspepsia  and  should  be  humored 
along.  But  a  fat  man  with  a  grouch  is  inex 
cusable  in  any  company — there  is  so  much 
of  him  to  be  grouchy.  He  constitutes  a 
wave  of  discontent  and  a  period  of  general 
depression.  He  is  not  expected  to  be  ro 
mantic  and  sentimental  either.  It  is  all 
right  for  a  giraffe  to  be  sentimental,  but  not 
a  hippopotamus.  If  you  doubt  me  consult 
any  set  of  natural  history  pictures.  The 
giraffe  is  shown  with  his  long  and  sinuous 
neck  entwined  in  fond  embrace  about  the 
neck  of  his  mate;  but  the  amphibious, 
blood-sweating  hippo  is  depicted  as  spout 
ing  and  wallowing,  morose  and  misan 
thropic,  in  a  mud  puddle  off  by  himself. 


12          Cobles  Anatomy 

In  passing  I  may  say  that  I  regard  this  com 
parison  as  a  particularly  apt  one,  because  I 
know  of  no  living  creature  so  truly^amphib- 
ious  in  hot  weather  as  an  open-pored  fat 
man,  unless  it  is  a  hippopotamus. 

Oh  how  true  is  the  saying  that  nobody 
loves  a  fat  man!  When  fat  comes  up  on 
the  front  porch  love  jumps  out  of  the  third- 
story  window.  Love  in  a  cottage?  Yes. 
Love  in  a  rendering  plant?  No.  A  fat 
man's  heart  is  supposed  to  lie  so  far  inland 
that  the  softer  emotions  cannot  reach  it  at 
all.  Yet  the  fattest  are  the  truest,  if  you  did 
but  know  it,  and  also  they  are  the  tenderest; 
and  a  man  with  a  double  chin  rarely  leads 
a  double  life.  For  one  thing,  it  requires 
too  much  moving  round. 

A  fat  man  cannot  wear  the  clothes  he 
would  like  to  wear.  As  a  race,  fat  men  are 
fond  of  bright  and  cheerful  colors;  but  no 
fat  man  can  indulge  his  innocent  desires  in 
this  direction  without  grieving  his  family 
and  friends  and  exciting  the  derisive  laugh 
ter  of  the  unthinking.  If  he  puts  on  a  fancy- 
flowered  vest,  they'll  say  he  looks  like  a 
Hanging  Garden  of  Babylon.  And  yet  he 


Tummies  13 


has  a  figure  just  made  for  showing  off  a 
fancy-flowered  vest  to  best  effect.  He  may 
favor  something  in  light  checks  for  his 
spring  suit;  but  if  he  ventures  abroad  in  a 
checked  suit,  ribald  strangers  will  look  at 
him  meaningly  and  remark  to  one  another 
that  the  center  of  population  appears  to  be 
shifting  again.  It  has  been  my  observation 
that  fat  men  are  instinctively  drawn  to  short 
tan  overcoats  for  the  early  fall.  But  a  fat 
man  in  a  short  tan  overcoat,  strolling  up  the 
avenue  of  a  sunny  afternoon,  will  be  con 
stantly  overhearing  persons  behind  him 
wondering  why  they  didn't  wait  until  night 
to  move  the  bank  vault.  That  irks  him  sore; 
but  if  he  turns  round  to  reproach  them  he  is 
liable  to  shove  an  old  lady  or  a  poor  blind 
man  off  the  sidewalk,  and  then,  like  as  not, 
some  gamin  will  sing  out:  "Hully  gee, 
Chimmy,  wot's  become  of  the  rest  of  the 
parade?  'Ere's  the  bass  drum  goin'  home 
all  by  itself." 

I've  known  of  just  such  remarks  being 
made  and  I  assure  you  they  cut  a  sensitive 
soul  to  the  core.  Not  for  the  fat  man  are 
the  snappy  clothes  for  varsity  men  and  the 


14          CobISs  slucitowy 

patterns  called  by  the  tailors  confined 
because  that  is  what  they  should  be,  but 
aren't.  Not  for  him  the  silken  shirt  with 
the  broad  stripes.  Shirts  with  stripes  that 
were  meant  to  run  vertically  but  are  caused 
to  run  horizontally,  by  reasons  over  which 
the  wearer  has  no  control,  remind  others  of 
the  awning  over  an  Italian  grocery.  So  the 
fat  man  must  stick  to  sober  navy  blues  and 
depressing  blacks  and  melancholy  grays. 
He  is  advised  that  he  should  wear  his  even 
ing  clothes  whenever  possible,  because  black 
and  white  lines  are  more  becoming  to  him. 
But  even  in  evening  clothes,  that  wide  ex 
panse  of  glazed  shirt  and  those  white 
enamel  studs  will  put  the  onlookers  in  mind 
of  the  front  end  of  a  dairy  lunch — or  so 
I  have  been  cruelly  told. 

When  planning  public  utilities,  who 
thinks  of  a  fat  man?  There  never  was  a 
hansom  cab  made  that  would  hold  a  fat 
man  comfortably  unless  he  left  the  doors 
open,  and  that  makes  him  feel  undressed. 
There  never  was  an  orchestra  seat  in  a  the 
ater  that  would  contain  all  of  him  at  the 
same  time — he  churns  up  and  sloshes  out 


Tummies  15 


over  the  sides.  Apartment  houses  and  ele 
vators  and  hotel  towels  are  all  constructed 
upon  the  idea  that  the  world  is  populated 
by  stock-size  people  with  those  double-A- 
last  shapes. 

Take  a  Pullman  car,  for  instance.  One 
of  the  saddest  sights  known  is  that  of  a 
fat  man  trying  to  undress  on  one  of  those 
closet  shelves  called  upper  berths  without 
getting  hopelessly  entangled  in  the  ham 
mock  or  committing  suicide  by  hanging 
himself  with  his  own  suspenders.  And  after 
that,  the  next  most  distressing  sight  is  the 
same  fat  man  after  he  has  undressed  and  is 
lying  there,  spouting  like  a  sperm-whale 
and  overflowing  his  reservation  like  a  crock 
of  salt-rising  dough  in  a  warm  kitchen,  and 
wondering  how  he  can  turn  over  without 
bulging  the  side  of  the  car  and  maybe  caus 
ing  a  wreck.  Ah  me,  those  dark  green  cur 
tains  with  the  overcoat  buttons  on  them  hide 
many  a  distressful  spectacle  from  the  travel 
ing  public! 

If  a  fat  man  undertakes  to  reduce  nobody 
sympathizes  with  him.  A  thin  man  trying 
to  fatten  up  so  he  won't  fall  all  the  way 


16         CohlSs  Anatomy 

through  his  trousers  when  he  draws  'em  on 
in  the  morning  is  an  object  of  sympathy  and 
of  admiration,  and  people  come  from  miles 
round  and  give  him  advice  about  how  to 
do  it.  But  suppose  a  fat  man  wants  to  train 
down  to  a  point  where,  when  he  goes  into 
a  telephone  booth  and  says  "Ninety-four 
Broad/'  the  spectators  will  know  he  is  try 
ing  to  get  a  number  and  not  telling  his  tailor 
what  his  waist  measure  is. 

Is  he  greeted  with  sympathetic  under 
standing?  He  is  not.  He  is  greeted  with 
derision  and  people  stand  round  and  gloat 
at  him.  The  authorities  recommend  health 
exercises,  but  health  exercises  are  almost  in 
variably  undignified  in  effect  and  wearing 
besides.  Who  wants  to  greet  the  dewy  morn 
by  lying  flat  on  his  back  and  lifting  his  feet 
fifty  times?  What  kind  of  a  way  is  that 
to  greet  the  dewy  morn  anyhow?  And 
bending  over  with  the  knees  stiff  and  touch 
ing  the  tips  of  the  toes  with  the  tips  of  the 
fingers — that's  no  employment  for  a  grown 
man  with  a  family  to  support  and  a  position 
to  maintain  in  society.  Besides  which  it  can 
not  be  done.  T  make  the  statement  unequiv- 


Tummies  1 7 


ocally  and  without  fear  of  successful  contra 
diction  that  it  cannot  be  done.  And  if  it 
could  be  done — which  as  I  say  it  can't— 
there  would  be  no  real  pleasure  in  touching 
a  set  of  toes  that  one  has  known  of  only  by 
common  rumor  for  years.  Those  toes  are 
the  same  as  strangers  to  you — you  knew  they 
were  in  the  neighborhood,  of  course,  but 
you  haven't  been  intimate  with  them. 

Maybe  you  try  dieting,  which  is  contrary 
to  nature.  Nature  intended  that  a  fat  man 
should  eat  heartily,  else  why  should  she 
endow  him  with  the  capacity  and  the 
accommodations.  Starving  in  the  midst 
of  plenty  is  not  for  him  who  has  plenty 
of  midst.  Nature  meant  that  a  fat  man 
should  have  an  appetite  and  that  he  should 
gratify  it  at  regular  intervals — meant  that 
he  should  feel  like  the  Grand  Canon  before 
dinner  and  like  the  Royal  Gorge  afterward. 
Anyhow,  dieting  for  a  fat  man  consists  in 
not  eating  anything  that's  fit  to  eat.  The 
specialist  merely  tells  him  to  eat  what  a 
horse  would  eat  and  has  the  nerve  to  charge 
him  for  what  he  could  have  found  out  for 
himself  at  any  livery  stable.  Of  course  he 


18         Cobb^s  Anatomy 

might  bant  in  the  same  way  that  a  woman 
bants.  You  know  how  a  woman  bants.  She 
begins  the  day  very  resolutely,  and  if  you 
are  her  husband  you  want  to  avoid  irritat 
ing  her  or  upsetting  her,  because  hell  hath 
no  fury  like  a  woman  banting.  For  break 
fast  she  takes  a  swallow  of  lukewarm  water 
and  half  of  a  soda  cracker.  For  luncheon 
she  takes  the  other  half  of  the  cracker  and 
leaves  off  the  water.  For  dinner  she  orders 
everything  on  the  menu  except  the  date  and 
the  name  of  the  proprietor.  She  does  this 
in  order  to  give  her  strength  to  go  on  with 
the  treatment. 

No  fat  man  would  diet  that  way;  but  no 
matter  which  way  he  does  diet  it  doesn't  do 
him  any  good.  Health  exercises  only  make 
him  muscle-sore  and  bring  on  what  the 
Harvard  ball  team  call  the  Charles  W. 
Horse;  while  banting  results  in  attacks  of 
those  kindred  complaints — the  Mollie  K. 
Grubbs  and  the  Fan  J.  Todds. 

Walking  is  sometimes  recommended  and 
the  example  of  the  camel  is  pointed  out,  the 
camel  being  a  creature  that  can  walk  for 
days  and  days.  But,  as  has  been  said  by 


Tummies  19 


some  thinking  person,  who  in  thunder 
wants  to  be  a  camel?  The  subject  of  horse 
back  riding  is  also  brought  up  frequently 
in  this  connection.  It  is  one  of  the  common 
est  delusions  among  fat  men  that  horseback 
riding  will  bring  them  down  and  make 
them  sylphlike  and  willowy.  I  have  sev 
eral  fat  men  among  my  lists  of  acquaint 
ances  who  labor  under  this  fallacy.  None 
of  them  was  ever  a  natural-born  horseback 
rider;  none  of  them  ever  will  be.  I  like 
to  go  out  of  a  bright  morning  and  take  a 
comfortable  seat  on  a  park  bench — one 
park  bench  is  plenty  roomy  enough  if  no 
body  else  is  using  it — and  sit  there  and 
watch  these  unhappy  persons  passing  single 
file  along  the  bridle-path.  I  sit  there  and 
gloat  until  by  rights  I  ought  to  be  required 
to  take  out  a  gloater's  license. 

Mind  you,  I  have  no  prejudice  against 
horseback  riding  as  such.  Horseback  rid 
ing  is  all  right  for  mounted  policemen  and 
Colonel  W.  F.  Cody  and  members  of  the 
Stickney  family  and  the  party  who  used  to 
play  Mazeppa  in  the  sterling  drama  of  that 
name.  That  is  how  those  persons  make  their 


20          Coblfs  A  tut  tow y 

living.  They  are  suited  for  it  and  accli 
mated  to  it.  It  is  also  all  right  for  eques 
trian  statues  of  generals  in  the  Civil  War. 
But  it  is  not  a  fit  employment  for  a  fat  man, 
and  especially  for  a  fat  man  who  insists  on 
trying  to  ride  a  hard-trotting  horse  English 
style,  which  really  isn't  riding  at  all  when 
you  come  right  down  to  cases,  but  an  out 
door  cure  for  neurasthenia  invented,  I  take 
it,  by  a  British  subject  who  was  nervous 
himself  and  hated  to  stay  long  in  one  place. 
So,  as  I  was  saying,  I  sit  there  on  my  com 
fortable  park  bench  and  watch  those  friends 
of  mine  bouncing  by,  each  wearing  on  his 
face  that  set  expression  which  is  seen  also 
on  the  faces  of  some  men  while  waltzing, 
and  on  the  faces  of  most  women  when  en 
tertaining  their  relatives  by  marriage.  I 
have  one  friend  who  is  addicted  to  this  form 
of  punishment  in  a  violent,  not  to  say  a  ma 
lignant  form.  He  uses  for  his  purpose  a 
tall  and  self-willed  horse  of  the  Tudor  per 
iod — a  horse  with  those  high  dormer  effects 
and  a  sloping  mansard.  This  horse  must 
have  been  raised,  I  think,  in  the  knockabout 
song-and-dance  business.  Every  time  he 


Tummies  21 


hears  music  or  thinks  he  hears  it  he  stops 
and  vamps  with  his  feet.  When  he  does 
this  my  friend  bends  forward  and  clutches 
him  round  the  neck  tightly.  I  think  he 
is  trying  to  whisper  in  the  horse's  ear  and 
beg  him  in  .Heaven's  name  to  forbear;  but 
what  he  looks  like  is  Santa  Claus  with  a 
clean  shave,  sitting  on  the  combing  of  a 
very  steep  house  with  his  feet  hanging  over 
the  eaves,  peeking  down  the  chimney  to  see 
if  the  children  are  asleep  yet.  When  that 
horse  dies  he  will  still  have  finger  marks 
on  his  throat  and  the  authorities  will  sus 
pect  foul  play  probably. 

Once  I  tried  it  myself.  I  was  induced  to 
scale  the  heights  of  a  horse  that  was  built 
somewhat  along  the  general  idea  of  the 
Andes  Mountains,  only  more  rugged  and 
steeper  nearing  the  crest.  From  the  ground 
he  looked  to  be  not  more  than  sixteen  hands 
high,  but  as  soon  as  I  was  up  on  top  of  him 
I  immediately  discerned  that  it  was  not  six 
teen  hands — it  was  sixteen  miles.  What  I 
had  taken  for  the  horse's  blaze  face  was  a 
snow-capped  peak.  Miss  Anna  Peck  might 
have  felt  at  home  up  there,  because  she  has 


22          Cobles  Anatomy 

had  the  experience  and  is  used  to  that  sort 
of  thing,  but  I  am  no  mountain  climber 
myself. 

Before  I  could  make  any  move  to  descend 
to  the  lower  and  less  ra rifled  altitudes  the 
horse  began  executing  a  few  fancy  steps, 
and  he  started  traveling  sidewise  with  a 
kind  of  a  slanting  bias  movement  that  was 
extremely  disconcerting,  not  to  say  alarm 
ing,  instead  of  proceeding  straight  ahead  as 
a  regular  horse  would.  I  clung  there  astrad 
dle  of  his  ridge  pole,  with  my  fingers 
twined  in  his  mane,  trying  to  anticipate 
where  he  would  be  next,  in  order  to  be  there 
to  meet  him  if  possible;  and  I  resolved 
right  then  that,  if  Providence  in  His  wis 
dom  so  willed  it  that  1  should  get  down 
from  up  there  alive,  I  would  never  do  so 
again.  However,  I  did  not  express  these 
longings  in  words — not  at  that  time.  At 
that  time  there  were  only  two  words  in  the 
English  language  which  seemed  to  come  to 
me.  One  of  them  was  "Whoa"  and  the 
other  was  "Ouch,"  and  I  spoke  them  alter 
nately  with  such  rapidity  that  they  merged 
into  the  compound  word  "Whouch,"  which 


Tummies  23 


is  a  very  expressive  word  and  one  that  I 
would  freely  recommend  to  others  who  may 
be  situated  as  I  was. 

At  that  moment,  of  all  the  places  in  the 
world  that  I  could  think  of — and  I  could 
think  of  a  great  many  because  the  events  of 
my  past  life  were  rapidly  flashing  past  me— 
as  is  customary,  I  am  told,  in  other  cases 
of  grave  peril,  such  as  drowning — I  say  of 
all  the  places  in  the  world  there  were  just 
two  where  I  least  desired  to  be — one  was  up 
on  top  of  that  horse  and  the  other  was  down 
under  him.  But  it  seemed  to  be  a  choice 
of  the  two  evils,  and  so  I  chose  the  lesser 
and  got  under  him.  I  did  this  by  a  simple 
expedient  that  occurred  to  me  at  the  mo 
ment.  I  fell  off.  I  was  tramped  on  con 
siderably,  and  the  earth  proved  to  be  harder 
than  it  looked  when  viewed  from  an  ap 
proximate  height  of  sixteen  miles  up,  but 
I  lived  and  breathed — or  at  least  I  breathed 
after  a  time  had  elasped — and  I  was  sat 
isfied.  And  so,  having  gone  through  this 
experience  myself,  I  am  in  position  to  ap 
preciate  what  any  other  man  of  my  general 
build  is  going  through  as  I  see  him  bobbing 


24        Cob  IS  s  Anatomy 

by — the  poor  martyr,  sacrificing  himself  as 
a  burnt  offering,  or  anyway  a  blistered  one 
—on  the  high  altar  of  a  Gothic  ruin  of  a 
horse.  And,  besides,  I  know  that  riding  a 
horse  doesn't  reduce  a  fat  man.  It  merely 
reduces  the  horse. 

So  it  goes— the  fat  man  is  always  up 
against  it.  His  figure  is  half-masted  in  re 
gretful  memory  of  the  proportions  he  had 
once,  and  he  is  made  to  mourn.  Most  sports 
and  many  gainful  pursuits  are  closed  against 
him.  He  cannot  play  lawn  tennis,  or,  at 
least  according  to  my  observation,  he  can 
not  play  lawn  tennis  oftener  than  once  in 
two  weeks.  In  between  games  he  limps 
round,  stiff  as  a  hat  tree  and  sore  as  a  mashed 
thumb.  Time  was  when  he  might  mingle 
in  the  mystic  mazes  of  the  waltz,  tripping 
the  light  fantastic  toe  or  stubbing  it,  as  the 
case  may  be.  But  that  was  in  the  days  of 
the  old-fashioned  square  dance,  which  was 
the  fat  man's  friend  among  dances,  and  also 
of  the  old-fashioned  two-step,  and  not  in 
these  times  when  dancing  is  a  cross  between 
a  wrestling  match,  a  contortion  act  and  a 
trip  on  a  roller-coaster,  and  is  either  named 


"NOT  IN  THESE  TIMES  WHEN  DANCING  IS  A  CROSS 
BETWEEN  A  WRESTLING  MATCH,  A  CONTORTION  ACT 
AND  A  TRIP  ON  A  ROLLER-COASTER" 


Tummies  21 


for  an  animal,  like  the  Bunny  Hug  and  the 
Tarantula  Glide,  or  for  a  town,  like  the 
Mobile  Mop-Up,  and  the  Far  Rockaway 
Rock  and  the  South  Bend  Bend.  His 
friends  would  interfere — or  the  authorities 
would.  He  can  go  in  swimming,  it  is  true; 
but  if  he  turns  over  and  floats,  people  yell 
out  that  somebody  has  set  the  life  raft 
adrift;  and  if  he  basks  at  the  water's  edge, 
boats  will  come  in  and  try  to  dock  along 
side  him;  and  if  he  takes  a  sun  bath  on  the 
beach  and  sunburns,  there's  so  everlasting 
much  of  him  to  be  sunburned  that  he  prac 
tically  amounts  to  a  conflagration.  He  can't 
shoot  rapids,  craps  or  big  game  with  any 
degree  of  comfort;  nor  play  billiards.  He 
can't  get  close  enough  to  the  table  to  make 
the  shots,  and  he  puts  all  the  English  on 
himself  and  none  of  it  on  the  cue  ball. 

Consider  the  gainful  pursuits.  Think 
how  many  of  them  are  denied  to  the  man 
who  may  have  energy  and  ability  but  is 
shut  out  because  there  are  a  few  extra  ter 
races  on  his  front  lawn.  A  fat  man  cannot 
be  a  leading  man  in  a  play.  Nobody  desires 
a  fat  hero  for  a  novel.  A  fat  man  cannot  go 


28        Cob  IS  s  Anatomy 

in  for  aeroplaning.  He  cannot  be  a  wire- 
walker  or  a  successful  walker  of  any  of  the 
other  recognized  brands — track,  cake,  sleep 
or  floor.  He  doesn't  make  a  popular  waiter. 
Nobody  wants  a  fat  waiter  on  a  hot  day. 
True,  you  may  make  him  bring  your  order 
under  covered  dishes,  but  even  so,  there  is 
still  that  suggestion  of  rain  on  a  tin  roof  that 
is  distasteful  to  so  many. 

So  I  repeat  that  fat  people  are  always  get 
ting  the  worst  of  it,  and  I  say  again,  of  all 
the  ills  that  flesh  is  heir  to,  the  worst  is  the 
flesh  itself.  As  the  poet  says — "The  world, 
the  flesh  and  the  devil"-  -and  there  you  have 
it  in  a  sentence — the  flesh  in  between,  catch 
ing  the  devil  on  one  side  and  the  jeers  of  the 
world  on  the  other.  I  don't  care  what  Dr. 
Woods  Hutchinson  or  any  other  thin  man 
says!  T  contend  that  history  is  studded  with 
instances  of  prominent  persons  who  lost  out 
because  they  got  fat.  Take  Cleopatra  now, 
the  lady  to  whom  Marc  Antony  said:  "I 
am  dying,  Egypt,  dying,"  and  then  re 
frained  from  doing  so  for  about  nineteen 
more  stanzas.  Cleo  or  Pat — she  was  known 
by  both  names,  T  hear — did  fairly  well  as  a 


Tummies  29 


queen,  as  a  coquette  and  as  a  promoter  of 
excursions  on  the  river — until  she  freshened 
up.  Then  she  flivvered.  Doctor  Johnson 
was  a  fat  man  and  he  suffered  from  prickly 
heat,  and  from  Boswell,  and  from  the  fact 
that  he  couldn't  eat  without  spilling  most 
of  the  gravy  on  his  second  mezzanine  land 
ing.  As  a  thin  and  spindly  stripling  Na 
poleon  altered  the  map  of  Europe  and  stood 
many  nations  on  their  heads.  It  was  after  he 
had  grown  fat  and  pursy  that  he  landed  on 
St.  Helena  and  spent  his  last  days  on  a  bar 
ren  rock,  with  his  arms  folded,  posing  for 
steel  engravings.  Nero  was  fat,  and  he  had 
a  lot  of  hard  luck  in  keeping  his  relatives— 
they  were  almost  constantly  dying  on  him— 
and  he  finally  had  to  stab  himself  with  one 
of  those  painful-looking  old  Roman  two- 
handed  swords,  lest  something  really  seri 
ous  befall  him.  Falstaff  was  fat,  and  he  lost 
the  favor  of  kings  in  the  last  act.  Coming 
down  to  our  own  day  and  turning  to  a  point 
no  farther  away  than  the  White  House  at 
Washington — but  have  we  not  enough  ex 
amples  without  becoming  personal? 

Yes,  I  know  Julius  Caesar  said:    "Let  me 


30        Cob  If  s  Anatomy 

have  men  about  me  that  are  fat."  But  you 
bet  it  wasn't  in  the  heated  period  when  J. 
Caesar  said  that! 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


TEETH 


Cobb's  Anatomy 


Teeth 

ONE  OF  THE  MOST  pleasant  fea 
tures  about  being  born,  as  I  con 
ceive  it,  is  that  we  are  born  without 
teeth.  I  believe  there  have  been  a  few  ex 
ceptions  to  this  rule — Richard  the  Third, 
according  to  the  accounts,  came  into  the 
world  equipped  with  all  his  teeth  and  a  per 
fectly  miserable  disposition;  and  once  in  a 
while,  especially  during  Roosevelt  years, 
when  the  Colonel's  picture  is  hanging  on 
the  walls  of  so  many  American  homes,  we 
read  in  the  paper  that  a  baby  has  just  been 
born  somewhere  with  a  full  set,  and  even, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  infant  son  of  a  former 
member  of  the  Rough  Riders,  with  nose 
glasses  and  a  close-cropped  mustache.  This, 
however,  may  have  been  a  pardonable  ex 
aggeration  of  the  real  facts.  As  I  recall 
now,  it  was  reported  in  a  dispatch  to  the 


36         Cobb^s  Anatomy 

New  York  Tribune  from  Lover's  Leap, 
Iowa,  during  the  presidential  campaign 
eight  years  ago. 

In  the  main,  though,  we  are  born  with 
out  teeth.  We  are  born  without  a  number 
of  things — clothes  for  example — although 
Anthony  Comstock  is  said  to  be  pushing  a 
law  requiring  all  children  to  be  born  with 
overalls  on;  but  teeth  is  the  subject  which 
we  are  now  discussing.  This  absence  of 
teeth  tends  to  give  the  very  young  of  our 
species  the  appearance  in  the  face  of  an  old 
fashioned  buckskin  purse  with  the  draw 
string  broken,  but  be  that  as  it  may,  we  are 
generally  fairly  well  content  with  life  until 
the  teeth  begin  to  come. 

First  there  are  the  milk  teeth.  Right 
there  our  troubles  start.  To  use  the  term 
commonly  in  use,  we  cut  them,  although  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  they  cut  us— cut  them  with 
the  aid  of  some  such  mussy  thing  as  a  tooth 
ing  ring  or  the  horny  part  of  the  nurse's 
thumb,  or  the  reverse  side  of  a  spoon — cut 
them  at  the  cost  of  infinite  sulk- ring,  not 
only  for  ourselves  but  for  everybody  else 
in  the  vicinity.  And  about  the  time  we  get 


I 


"CUT  THEM  WITH  SOME  SUCH  MUSSY  THING  AS- 
THE  HORNY  PART  OF  A  NURSE'S  THUMB" 


Teeth 39_ 

the  last  one  in  we  begin  to  lose  the  first  one 
out.  They  go  one  at  a  time,  by  falling  out, 
or  by  being  yanked  out,  or  by  coming  out  of 
their  own  accord  when  we  eat  molasses 
taffy.  They  were  merely  what  you  might 
call  our  Entered  Apprentice  teeth.  We  go 
in  now  for  the  full  thirty-two  degrees — one 
degree  for  each  tooth  and  thirty-two  teeth 
to  a  set.  By  arduous  and  painful  processes, 
stretching  over  a  period  of  years,  we  get 
our  regular  teeth — the  others  were  only 
volunteers — concluding  with  the  wisdom 
teeth,  as  so  called,  but  it  is  a  misnomer,  be 
cause  there  never  is  room  for  them  and  they 
have  to  stand  up  in  the  back  row  and  they 
usually  arrive  with  holes  in  them,  and  if  we 
really  possessed  any  wisdom  we  would  fig 
ure  out  some  way  of  abolishing  them  alto 
gether.  They  come  late  and  crowd  their 
way  in  and  push  the  other  teeth  out  of  line 
and  so  we  go  about  for  months  with  the  top 
of  our  mouths  filled  with  braces  and  wires 
and  things,  so  that  when  we  breathe  hard 
we  sob  and  croon  inside  of  ourselves  like  an 
Aeolean  harp. 

But  in  any  event  we  get  them  all  and  no 


40         Cobles  Anatomy 

sooner  do  we  get  them  than  we  begin  to  lose 
them.  They  develop  cavities  and  aches  and 
extra  roots  and  we  spend  a  good  part  of 
our  lives  and  most  of  our  substance  with  the 
dentist.  Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  all  we 
can  do  and  all  he  can  do,  we  keep  on  losing 
them.  And  after  awhile,  they  are  all  gone 
and  our  face  folds  up  on  us  like  a  crush 
hat  or  a  concertina  and  from  our  brow  to 
our  chin  we  don't  look  much  more  than  a 
third  as  long  as  we  used  to  look.  We  dis 
like  this  folded-up  appearance  naturally— 
who  wouldn't?  And  we  get  tired  of  living 
on  spoon  victuals  and  the  memory  of  past 
beef-steaks.  So  we  go  and  get  some  false 
ones  made.  They  have  to  be  made  to  order; 
there  appears  to  be  no  market  for  custom 
made  teeth;  you  never  see  any  hand-me- 
down  teeth  advertised,  guaranteed  to  fit  any 
face  and  withstand  a  damp  climate.  Get 
ting  them  made  to  order  is  a  long  and  un 
happy  process  and  I  will  pass  over  it  briefly. 
Having  got  them,  we  find  that  they  do  not 
fit  us  or  that  we  do  not  fit  them,  which 
comes  to  the  same  thing.  The  dentist  makes 
them  fit  by  altering  us  some  and  the  teeth 


"AND  OUR  FACE  FOLDS  UP  ON  US  LIKE  A 
CRUSH  HAT  OR  A  CONCERTINA" 


Teeth  43 

some,  and  after  some  months  they  quit  feel 
ing  as  though  they  didn't  belong  to  us  but 
had  been  borrowed  temporarily  from  some 
body's  loan  collection  of  ceramics. 

But  just  about  the  time  they  are  becom 
ing  acclimated  and  we  are  getting  used  to 
them,  the  interior  of  our  mouth  for  private 
reasons  best  known  to  itself  changes  around 
materially  and  we  either  have  to  go  back 
and  start  all  over  and  go  through  the  whole 
thing  again,  or  else  haply  we  die  and  pass 
on  to  the  bourne  from  which  no  traveller  re- 
turneth  either  with  his  teeth  or  without 
them.  If  Shakespeare  had  only  thought  of 
it — and  he  did  think  of  a  number  of  things 
from  time  to  time — he  might  have  divided 
his  Seven  Ages  of  Man  much  better  by 
making  them  the  Seven  Ages  of  Teeth  as 
follows:  First  age — no  tooth;  second  age 
—milk  teeth;  third  age — losing  'em;  fourth 
age — getting  more  teeth;  fifth  age — losing 
'em;  sixth  age — getting  false  teeth  and  find 
ing  they  aren't  satisfactory;  seventh  age- 
toothless  again. 

I  knew  a  man  once  who  was  a  gunsmith 
and  lost  all  his  teeth  at  a  comparatively 


44         (<ol>l  fs 


early  age.  He  went  along  that  way  for 
years.  He  had  to  eschew  the  tenderloin  for 
the  reason  that  he  couldn't  chew  it,  and  he 
had  to  cut  out  hickory  nut  cake  and  corn  on 
the  ear  and  such  things.  But  there  is  noth 
ing  about  the  art  of  gunsmithing  which 
seems  to  call  for  teeth,  so  he  got  along  very 
well,  living  in  a  little  house  with  the  wife 
of  his  bosom  and  a  faithful  housedog  named 
Ponto.  But  when  he  was  past  sixty  he  went 
and  got  himself  some  teeth  from  the  dentist. 
He  did  this  without  saying  anything  about 
it  at  home;  he  was  treasuring  it  up  for  a 
surprise.  The  corner  stone  was  laid  in  May 
and  the  scaffolding  was  all  up  by  July  and 
in  August  the  new  teeth  were  dedicated 
with  suitable  ceremonies. 

They  altered  his  appearance  materially. 
His  nose  and  chin  which  had  been  on  terms 
of  intimacy  now  rubbed  each  other  a  last 
fond  good-bye  and  his  face  lost  that  accor- 
dian-pleated  look  and  straightened  out  and 
became  about  six  or  seven  inches  longer 
from  top  to  bottom.  He  now  had  a  sort  of 
determined  aspect  like  the  iron  jawed  lady 
in  a  circus,  whereas  before  his  face  had  the 


"PONTO  CAME  OUT AND  BIT  HIM  SEVERELY 

IN  THE  CALF  OF  THE  LEG" 


Teeth  41 

appearance  of  being  folded  over  and  wad 
ded  down  inside  of  his  neck  band,  so  his  hat 
could  rest  comfortably  on  his  collar.  He 
knew  he  was  altered,  but  he  didn't  realize 
how  much  he  was  altered  until  he  went 
home  that  evening  and  walked  proudly  in 
the  front  gate.  His  wife  who  was  timid 
about  strangers,  slammed  the  door  right  in 
his  face  and  faithful  Ponto  came  out  from 
under  the  porch  steps  and  bit  him  severely 
in  the  calf  of  the  leg.  There  was  only  one 
consolation  in  it  for  him — -for  the  first  time 
in  a  long  number  of  years  he  was  in  position 
to  bite  back. 

And  that's  how  it  is  with  teeth — with 
your  teeth  let  us  say — for  right  here  I'm 
going  to  drop  the  personal  pronoun  and 
speak  of  them  as  your  teeth  from  now  on. 
If  anybody  has  to  suffer  it  might  as  well  be 
you  and  not  me;  I  expect  to  be  busy  telling 
about  it.  As  I  started  to  say  awhile  ago,  you 
—remember  it's  you  from  this  point — you 
get  your  regular  teeth  and  they  start  right 
in  giving  you  trouble.  Every  little  while 
one  of  them  bursts  from  its  cell  with  a  hor 
rible  yell  and  in  the  lulls  between  pangs  you 


48         Coblfs  Anatomy 

go  forth  among  men  with  the  haunted  look 
in  your  eye  of  one  who  is  listening  for  the 
footfalls  of  a  dread  apparition,  and  one- 
half  of  your  head  is  puffed  out  of  plumb  as 
though  you  were  engaged  in  the  whimsical 
idea  of  holding  an  egg  plant  in  the  side  of 
your  jaw.  A  kind  friend  meets  you,  and, 
speaking  with  that  high  courage  and  that 
lofty  spirit  of  sacrifice  which  a  kind  friend 
always  exhibits  when  it's  your  tooth  that  is 
kicking  up  the  rumpus  and  not  his,  lie  tells 
you  you  ought  to  have  something  done  for 
it  right  away.  You  know  that  as  well  as  he 
does,  but  you  hate  to  have  the  subject 
brought  up.  It's  your  toothache  anyhow. 
It  originated  with  you.  You  are  its  proud 
parent  but  not  so  awfully  proud  at  that. 
Mother  and  child  doing  as  well  as  could  be 
expected,  but  not  expected  to  do  very  well. 
But  these  friends  of  yours  keep  on  shoving 
their  free  advice  on  you  and  the  tooth  keeps 
on  getting  worse  and  worse  until  the  pain 
spreads  all  through  the  First  Ward  and 
finally  you  grab  your  resolution  in  both 
hands  to  keep  it  from  leaking  out  between 
your  fingers  and  you  go  to  the  dentist's. 


"LISTENING  FOR  THE  FOOTFALLS 
OF  A  DREAD  APPARITION" 


Teeth  51 

This  happens  so  many  times  that  after 
awhile  you  lose  count  and  so  would  the  den 
tist,  if  he  didn't  write  your  name  down 
every  time  in  his  little  red  book  with  pleas 
ingly  large  amounts  entered  opposite  to  it. 
It  seems  to  you  that  you  are  always  doing 
something  for  your  teeth?  You  have  them 
pulled  and  pushed  and  shoved  and  filled 
and  unfilled  and  refilled  and  excavated  and 
blasted  and  sculptured  and  scroll-sawed 
and  a  lot  of  other  things  that  you  wouldn't 
think  could  be  done  legally  without  a  build 
ing  permit.  As  time  passes  on,  the  inside 
of  your  once  well-filled  and  commodious 
head  becomes  but  little  more  than  a  recent 
site.  Your  vaults  have  been  blown  and 
most  of  your  contents  abstracted  by  Amal 
gam  Mike  and  Dental  Slim,  the  Demon 
Yeggmen  of  the  Human  Face.  You  are 
merely  the  scattered  clews  left  behind  for 
the  authorities  to  work  on;  you  are  the, 
faint  traces  of  the  fiendish  crime.  You  are 
the  point  marked  X. 

But  all  along  there  is  generally  one  tooth 
that  has  behaved  herself  like  a  lady.  Other 
teeth  may  have  betrayed  your  confidence 


52        Cob  IS  s  Atuitowy 

but  Old  Faithful  has  hung  on,  attending  to 
business,  asking  only  for  standing  room  and 
kind  treatment.  The  others  you  may  view 
with  alarm,  but  to  this  tooth  you  can  point 
with  pride.  But  have  a  care — she  is  de 
ceiving  you. 

Some  night  you  go  to  bed  and  have  a 
dream.  In  your  dream  it  seems  to  you  that 
a  fox  terrier  is  chasing  a  woodchuck  around 
and  around  the  inside  of  your  head.  I  n  that 
tangled  sort  of  fashion  peculiar  to  dreams 
your  sympathy  seems  to  go  out  first  to  the 
fox  terrier  and  then  to  the  woodchuck  as 
they  circle  about  nimbly,  leaping  from  your 
tonsils  to  your  larynx  and  then  up  over  the 
rafters  in  the  roof  of  your  mouth  and  down 
again  and  pattering  over  the  sub-maxillary 
from  side  to  side.  But  about  then  you  \\akc 
up  with  a  violent  start  and  decide  that  any 
sympathy  you  may  have  in  stock  should  be 
reserved  for  personal  use  exclusively,  be 
cause  at  this  moment  the  dog  trees  the 
woodchuck  at  the  base  of  that  cherished 
tooth  of  yours  and  starts  to  dig  him  out. 
He  is  a  determined  dog  and  very  active, 


"AT  THIS  MOMENT  THE  DOG  TREES  THE  WOODCHUCK 
AT  THE  BASE  OF  THAT  CHERISHED  TOOTH" 


Teeth  55 

but  he  needs  a  manicure.     You  are  struck 
by  that  fact  almost  immediately. 

Uttering  some  of  those  trite  and  common 
place  remarks  that  are  customary  for  use 
under  such  circumstances  and  yet  are  so 
futile  to  express  one's  real  sentiments,  you 
arise  and  undertake  to  pacify  the  infuriated 
creature  with  household  remedies.  You  try 
to  lure  him  away  with  a  wad  of  medicated 
cotton  stuck  on  the  end  of  a  parlor  match. 
But  arnica  is  evidently  an  acquired  taste 
with  him.  He  doesn't  seem  to  care  for  it 
any  more  than  you  do.  You  begin  to  dress, 
using  one  hand  to  put  your  clothes  on  with 
and  the  other  to  hold  the  top  of  your  head 
on.  At  this  important  juncture,  the  dog 
tears  down  the  last  remaining  partitions  and 
nails  the  woodchuck.  The  woodchuck  is 
game — say  what  you  will  about  the  habits 
and  customs  of  the  woodchuck  you  have  to 
hand  it  to  him  there — he's  game  as  a  lion. 
He  fights  back  desperately.  Intense  excite 
ment  reigns  throughout  the  vicinity.  While 
the  struggle  wages  you  get  your  clothes  on 
and  wait  for  daylight  to  come,  which  it 
does  in  from  eight  to  ten  weeks.  Norway  is 


Cob  If  s  Anatom 


not   the  only   place  where   the   nights    are 
six  months  long. 

There  is  nobody  waiting  at  the  dentist's 
when  you  get  there,  it  being  early.  You  are 
willing  to  wait.  At  a  barber  shop  it  may  be 
different  but  at  a  dentist's  you  are  always 
willing  to  wait,  like  a  gentleman.  But  the 
sinewy  young  man  who  is  sitting  in  the 
front  parlor  reading  the  Hammer  Throw 
er's  Gazette,  welcomes  you  with  a  false  air 
of  gaiety  entirely  out  of  keeping  with  the 
circumstances  and  invites  you  to  step  right 
in.  He  tells  you  that  you  are  next.  This 
is  wrong  —  if  you  were  next  you  would  turn 
and  flee  like  a  deer.  Not  being  next,  you 
enter.  Right  from  the  start  you  seem  to 
take  a  dislike  to  this  'young  man.  You 
catch  him  spitting  in  his  hands  and  hitching 
his  sleeves  up  as  you  are  hanging  up  your 
hat.  Besides  he  is  too  robust  for  a  dentist. 
With  those  shoulders  he  ought  to  be  a 
boiler  maker  or  a  safe  mover  or  something 
of  that  sort.  You  resolve  inwardly  that 
next  time  you  go  to  a  dentist  you  are  going 
to  one  of  a  more  lady-like  bearing  and 
gentler  demeanor.  It  seems  a  brutal  thing 


Teeth  57 

that  a  big  strong  man  should  waste  his  years 
in  a  dental  establishment  when  the  world  is 
clamoring  for  strong  men  to  do  the  heavy 
lifting  jobs.  But  before  you  can  say  any 
thing,  this  muscular  athlete  has  laid  violent 
hands  on  your  palpitating  form  and  wad 
ded  it  abruptly  into  the  hideous  embraces 
of  a  red  plush  chair,  which  looks  something 
like  the  one  they  use  up  at  Sing  Sing,  only 
it's  done  more  quickly  up  there  and  with 
less  suffering  on  the  part  of  the  condemned. 
On  one  side  of  you  you  behold  quite  a  dis 
play  of  open  plumbing  and  on  the  other 
side  a  tasty  exhibit  of  small  steel  tools  of 
assorted  sizes.  No  matter  which  way  your 
gaze  may  stray  you'll  be  seeing  something 
attractive. 

You  also  take  notice  of  an  electric  motor 
about  large  enough,  you  would  say,  to  run 
a  trolley  car,  which  is  purring  nearby  in  a 
sinister  and  forbidding  way.  They  are  con 
stantly  making  these  little  improvements  in 
the  dental  profession.  I  have  heard  that 
fifty  years  ago  a  dentist  traveled  about  over 
the  country  from  place  to  place,  sometimes 
pulling  a  tooth  and  sometimes  breaking  a 


.-><V         Cob  IS  s  Anatomy 

colt.  He  practiced  his  art  with  an  outfit  con 
sisting  of  two  pairs  of  iron  forceps — one  pair 
being  saber-toothed  while  the  other  pair  was 
merely  saw-fretted — and  he  gave  a  man  the 
same  kind  of  treatment  he  gave  a  horse,  only 
he  tied  the  horse's  legs  first.  But  now  elec 
tricity  is  in  general  use  and  no  dentist's 
establishment  is  complete  without  a  dyna 
mo  attachment  which  makes  a  crooning 
sound  when  in  operation  and  provides  in 
strumental  accompaniment  to  the  song  of 
the  official  canary. 

I  know  why  a  barber  in  a  country  town 
is  always  learning  to  play  on  the  guitar  and 
I  know  why  a  man  with  an  emotional 
Adam's  apple  always  wears  an  open  front 
collar.  I  know  these  things,  but  am  debar 
red  from  telling  them  by  reason  of  a  solemn 
oath.  But  I  have  not  yet  been  able  to  dis 
cover  why  every  dentist  keeps  a  canary  in 
his  office.  Nor  do  I  know  why  it  is,  just  as 
you  settle  your  neck  back  on  a  head  rest 
that's  every  bit  as  comfortable  as  an  anvil, 
and  just  as  a  dentist  climbs  into  you  as  far 
as  the  arm  pits  and  begins  probing  at  the 
bottom  of  a  tooth  which  has  roots  extending 


Teeth  59 

back  behind  your  ears,  like  an  old-fash 
ioned  pair  of  spectacles,  that  the  canary 
bird  should  wipe  his  nose  on  a  cuttle  bone 
and  dash  into  a  melodious  outburst  of  two 
hundred  thousand  twitters,  all  of  them 
being  twitters  of  the  same  size,  shape,  and 
color.  For  that  matter,  I  don't  even  know 
what  kind  of  an  animal  a  cuttle  is,  although 
I  should  say  from  the  shape  of  his  bone  as 
used  by  the  canary  instead  of  a  pocket 
handkerchief,  that  he  is  circular  and  flat 
and  stands  on  edge  only  with  the  utmost 
difficulty.  If  you  will  pardon  my  tempor 
ary  digressions  into  the  realm  of  natural 
history,  we  will  now  return  to  the  main  sub 
ject,  which  was  your  tooth. 

The  moment  the  muscular  young  man 
starts  up  his  motor  and  gives  the  canary  its 
music  cue  and  begins  pawing  over  his  tool 
collection  to  pick  out  a  good  sharp  one,  you 
recover.  All  of  a  sudden  you  feel  fine,  and 
so  does  the  tooth.  Neither  one  of  you  ever 
felt  better.  The  fox  terrier  must  have 
killed  the  woodchuck  and  then  committed 
suicide.  You  are  about  to  mention  this 
double  tragedy  and  beg  the  young  man's 


Cobles  Anatom 


pardon  for  causing  him  any  trouble  and  ex 
cuse  yourself  and  go  away,  but  just  then  he 
quits  feeling  of  his  biceps  and  suddenly 
siezes  you  by  your  features  and  undoes  them. 
If  you  are  where  you  can  catch  a  glimpse  of 
yourself  in  a  mirror  you  will  immediately 
note  how  much  the  human  face  divine  can 
be  made  to  look  like  an  old-fashioned  red 
brick  Colonial  fire  place. 

There  are  likely  to  be  several  things  you 
would  like  to  talk  about.  You  arc  full  of 
thoughts  seeking  utterance.  For  one  thing 
you  want  to  tell  him  you  don't  think  the 
brand  of  soap  he  uses  on  his  hands  is  going 
to  agree  with  you  at  all.  You  probably 
don't  care  personally  for  the  way  your  bar 
ber's  thumb  tastes  either,  but  a  barber's 
thumb  is  Peaches  Melba  alongside  of  a 
dentist's.  Before  you  can  say  anything 
though  he  discovers  a  cavity  or  orifice  of 
sonic  sort  in  the  base  of  your  tooth.  It  BCCms 
to  give  him  pleasure.  Filled  with  intense 
gratification  by  this  discovery  and  fired 
moreover  by  the  impetuous  ardor  of  the 
chase,  he  grabs  up  a  crochet  needle  with  a 
red  hot  stinger  on  the  end  of  it  and  jabs  it 


Teeth  61 

down  your  tooth  to  a  point  about  opposite 
where  your  suspenders  fork  in  the  back. 

You  have  words  with  him  then,  or  at 
least  you  start  to  have  words  with  him,  but 
he  puts  his  knee  in  your  chest  and  tells  you 
that  it  really  doesn't  hurt  at  all,  but  is  only 
your  imagination,  and  utters  other  soothing 
remarks  of  that  general  nature.  He  then 
exchanges  the  crochet  needle  for  a  kind  of 
an  instrument  with  a  burr  on  the  end  of  it. 
This  instrument  first  came  into  use  at  the 
time  of  the  Spanish  Inquisition  but  has 
since  been  greatly  improved  on  and  brought 
right  up  to  date.  He  takes  this  handy  little 
utensil  and  proceeds  to  stir  up  your  imagin 
ation  some  more.  You  again  try  to  say 
something,  speaking  in  a  muffled  tone,  but 
he  is  not  listening.  He  is  calling  to  a  broth 
er  assassin  in  the  adjoining  room  to  come 
and  see  a  magnificent  example  of  a  prime 
old-vatted  triple  X  exposed  nerve.  So  the 
Second  Grave  Digger  rests  his  tools  against 
the  palate  of  his  victim  and  comes  in. 

As  nearly  as  you  can  gather  from  hearsay 
evidence,  you  not  being  an  eye  witness  your 
self,  one  of  them  harpoons  the  nerve  just 


62         Cob  If 


bjick  of  the  gills  with  a  nutpick  —  remember 
please  it  is  your  nerve  that  they  are  taking 
all  these  liberties  with  —  and  pulls  it  out  of 
its  retreat  and  the  other  man  takes  a  tack 
hammer  and  tries  to  beat  its  brains  out.  Any 
time  he  misses  the  nerve  he  hits  you,  so  his 
average  is  still  a  thousand,  and  it  is  fine 
practice  for  him.  A  pleasant  time  is  had 
by  everybody  present  except  you  and  the 
nerve.  The  nerve  wraps  its  hind  legs 
around  your  breastbone  and  hangs  on  des 
perately.  You  perspire  freely  and  make 
noises  like  a  drunken  Zulu  trying  to  sing  a 
Swedish  folk  song  while  holding  a  spoonful 
of  hot  mush  in  his  mouth. 

In  time  becoming  wearied  even  of  these 
congenial  diversions  and  tiring  of  the  shop 
talk  that  has  been  going  on,  the  second  den 
tist  returns  to  his  original  prey  and  the 
party  who  has  you  in  charge  tries  a  new  ex 
periment.  He  arms  himself  with  a  kind  of 
an  automatic  hammering  machine,  some 
what  similar  to  the  steam  riveter  used  in 
constructing  steel  office  buildings,  except 
that  this  one  is  more  compact  and  can  de 
liver  about  eighty-five  more  blows  to  the 


Teeth  63 

second.  Thus  equipped,  he  descends  far 
below  your  high  water  mark  and  engages  in 
aquatic  sports  and  pastimes  for  a  consider 
able  period  of  time.  It  seems  to  you  that 
you  never  saw  a  man  who  could  go  down 
and  stay  down  as  long  as  this  young  man 
can.  You  begin  to  feel  that  you  misjudged 
his  real  vocation  in  life  when  you  decided 
that  he  ought  to  be  a  boiler  maker.  You 
know  that  he  was  intended  for  pearl  fish 
ing.  He's  a  natural  born  deep  sea  diver. 
He  doesn't  even  have  to  come  up  to  breathe, 
but  stays  below,  knee  deep  in  your  tide 
wash,  merrily  knocking  chunks  off  your 
lowermost  coral  reefs  with  his  little  steam 
riveter  and  having  a  perfectly  lovely  time. 

You  are  overflowing  copiously  and  you 
wish  he  would  take  the  time  to  stop  and 
bail  you  out.  You  abhor  the  idea  of  being 
drowned  as  an  inside  job.  But  no,  he  keeps 
right  on  and  along  about  here  it  is  custom 
ary  for  you  to  swoon  away. 

On  recovering,  you  observe  that  he  has 
changed  his  mind  again.  He  is  now  going 
in  for  amateur  theatricals  and  is  using 
you  for  a  theatre.  First  thoughtfully  drap- 


(>4         Cob  If  s  Anatomy 

ing  a  little  rubber  drop  curtain  across  your 
proscenium  arch  to  keep  you  from  seeing 
what  is  going  on  behind  your  own  scenes, 
he  is  setting  the  stage  for  the  thrilling  saw 
mill  scene  in  Blue  Jeans.  You  can  dis 
tinctly  feel  the  circular  saw  at  work  and 
you  can  taste  a  hod  of  mortar  and  a  bucket 
of  hot  tar  and  one  thing  and  another  that 
have  been  left  in  the  wings.  You  also  judge 
that  the  insulation  is  burning  off  of  an  elec 
tric  fixture  somewhere  up  stage. 

All  this  time  the  tooth  is  still  offering 
resistance,  and  eventually  the  dentist  comes 
out  in  front  once  more  and  makes  a  little 
curtain  speech  to  you.  He  has  just  ascer 
tained  that  what  the  tooth  really  needed  was 
not  filling  but  pulling.  He  thought  at 
first  that  it  should  be  filled,  and  that  is  what 
he  has  been  doing  -filling  it — but  now  he 
knows  that  pulling  is  the  indicated  proced 
ure.  He  does  not  understand  how  a  tooth 
that  seemed  so  open  could  have  deceived 
him.  Nevertheless  he  will  now  pull  the 
tooth. 

He  pulls  her.  She  does  her  level  best 
but  he  pulls  her.  He  harvests  small  sections 


Teeth  65 

of  the  gum  from  time  to  time  and  occasion 
ally  he  stops  long  enough  to  loosen  up  the 
roots  as  far  down  as  your  floating  ribs.  But 
he  pulls  her.  He  spares  no  pains  to  pull 
that  tooth.  Or  if  he  spares  any  you  are  not 
able  subsequently  to  remember  what  they 
were.  You  utter  various  loud  sounds  in  a 
strange  and  incomprehensible  language  and 
he  lays  back  and  braces  his  knees  against 
your  lower  jaw,  and  the  tooth  utters  the 
death  rattle  and  begins  picking  the  cover 
lid.  And  then  he  gives  one  final  heave  and 
breaks  the  roots  away  from  the  lower  part 
of  your  spinal  column  to  which  they  were 
adhering,  and  emerges  into  the  open  pant 
ing  but  triumphant,  and  holds  his  trophy 
up  for  you  to  look  at.  If  you  didn't  know 
it  was  your  tooth  you  would  take  it  for  an 
old-fashioned  china  cuspidor  that  had 
been  neglected  by  the  janitor. 

It  was  a  tooth  that  you  had  been  prizing 
for  years,  but  now  you  wouldn't  have  it  as 
a  gracious  gift.  You  are  through  with  that 
tooth  forever.  You  never  want  to  see  it 
again. 

As  for  the  dentist,  he  collects  the  fixed 


66        CohlSs  Anatomy 

charge  for  stumpagc  and  corkage  and  one 
thing  and  another  and  you  come  away  with 
a  feeling  in  the  side  of  your  jaw  like  a  va 
cant  lot.  Your  tongue  keeps  going  over 
there  to  see  if  it  can  recognize  the  old  place 
by  the  hole  where  the  foundations  used  to 
be.  You  never  realized  before  what  a  base 
ment  there  was  to  a  tooth. 

As  you  come  out  you  pass  a  fresh  victim 
going  in  and  you  see  the  dentist  welcome 
him  and  then  turn  to  crank  up  his  motor 
and  you  hear  the  canary  tuning  up  with  a 
new  line  of  v-shaped  twitters.  And  you  are 
glad  that  he  is  the  one  who  is  going  in  and 
that  you  are  the  one  who  is  coming  out. 

Science  tells  us  that  the  teeth  are  the  hard 
est  things  in  the  human  composition,  which 
is  all  very  well  as  far  as  it  goes,  but  \\h;it 
science  should  do  is  to  go  on  and  finish  the 
sentence.     It  means  the  hardest  to  keep. 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


HAIR 


Cobb's  Anatomy 


Hair 

A3  I  REMARKED  in  the  preceding 
chapter  of  this  work,  one  of  the 
pleasantest    features    about    being 
born  is  that  we  are  born  without  teeth  and 
other  responsibilities.    Teeth,  like  debts  and 
installment  payments,  come  along  later  on. 
It  is  the  same  way  with  hair. 

Born,  we  are,  hairless  or  comparatively 
so.  We  are  in  a  highly  incomplete  state 
at  that  period  of  our  lives.  It  takes  a  fond 
and  doting  parent  to  detect  evidences  of  an 
actual  human  aspect  in  us.  Only  the  ears 
and  the  mouth  appear  to  be  up  to  the  plans 
and  specifications.  There  is  a  mouth  which 
when  opened,  as  it  generally  is,  makes  the 
rest  of  the  face  look  like  a  tire,  and  there  is 
a  pair  of  ears  of  such  generous  size  that  only 
a  third  one  is  needed,  round  at  the  back 
somewhere,  to  give  us  the  appearance  of  a 


12         Cob  IS  s  Anatomy 

loving  cup.  And  we  arc  smocked  and  hem 
stitched  with  a  million  wrinkles  apiece, 
more  or  less,  which  partly  accounts  for  the 
fact  that  every  newborn  infant  looks  to  be 
about  two  hundred  years  old.  And  uni 
formly  we  have  the  nice  red  complexion  of 
a  restaurant  lobster.  You  know  that  live- 
broiled  look? 

As  for  our  other  features,  they  are  more 
or  less  rudimentary.  Of  a  nose  there  is  only 
what  a  chemist  would  call  a  trace.  It  seems 
hard  to  imagine  that  a  dinky  little  nubbin 
like  that,  a  dimple  turned  inside  out,  as  it 
were,  will  ever  develop  into  a  regular  nose, 
with  a  capacity  for  freckling  in  the  summer 
and  catching  cold  in  the  winter — a  nose 
that  you  can  sneeze  through  and  blow  with. 
There  are  no  eyebrows  to  speak  of  either, 
and  the  skull  runs  up  to  a  sharp  point  like 
a  pineapple  cheese.  Just  back  of  the  peak 
is  a  kind  of  soft,  dented-in  place  like  a 
Parker  House  roll,  and  if  you  touch  it  we 
ciie.  In  some  cases  this  spot  remains  soft 
throughout  life,  and  these  persons  grow  up 
and  go  through  railroad  trains  in  presi 
dential  years  taking  straw  votes. 


"IT  TAKES  A  FOND  AND  DOTING  PARENT  TO  DETECT 
EVIDENCES  OF  AN  ACTUAL  HUMAN  ASPECT  IN  US" 


Hair  75 

And,  as  I  said  before,  there  isn't  any  hair; 
only  on  the  slopes  of  the  cheese  are  some 
very  pale,  faint,  downy  lines,  which  look  as 
though  they  had  been  sketched  on  lightly 
with  a  very  soft  drawing  pencil  and  would 
wipe  off  readily.  That,  however,  is  the 
inception  and  beginning  of  what  afterward 
becomes,  among  our  race,  hair.  To  look  at 
it  you  could  hardly  believe  it,  but  it  is.  Bar 
ring  accidents  or  backwardness,  it  continues 
to  grow  from  that  time  on  through  our 
childhood,  but  its  behavior  is  always  a  pro 
found  disappointment.  If  the  child  is  a  girl 
and,  therefore,  entitled  to  curly  hair,  her 
hair  is  sure  to  come  in  stiff  and  straight. 
If  it's  a  boy,  to  whom  curls  will  be  a  curse 
and  a  cross  of  affliction,  he  is  morally  cer 
tain  to  be  as  curly  as  a  frizzly  chicken, 
and  until  he  gets  old  enough  to  rebel  he 
will  wear  long  ringlets  and  boys  of  his 
acquaintance  will  insert  cockle-burs  and 
chewing  gum  into  his  tresses,  and  he  will 
be  known  popularly  as  Sissie  and  other 
wise  his  life  witji  be  made  joyous  and  care 
free  for  him.  If  a  reddish  tone  of  hair  is 
desired  it  is  certain  to  grow  out  yellow 


76         Cobles  Anatomy 

or  brown  or  black;  and  if  brown  is  your 
favorite  shade  you  are  absolutely  sure  to  be 
nice  and  red-headed,  with  eyebrows  and 
lashes  to  match,  and  so  many  cowlicks  that 
when  you  remove  your  hat  people  will  think 
you're  wearing  two  or  three  halos  at  once. 
Hair  rarely  or  never  acts  up  to  its  advance 
notices. 

One  of  the  earliest  and  most  painful  recol 
lections  of  my  youth  is  associated  with  hair. 
I  still  tingle  warmly  when  I  think  of  it. 
I  should  say  I  was  about  eight  years  old 
at  the  time.  My  mother  sent  me  down 
the  street  to  the  barber's  to  have  my  hair 
trimmed — shingled  was  the  term  then  used. 
Some  of  my  private  collection  of  cowlicks 
had  begun  to  stand  up  in  a  way  that  invited 
adverse  criticism  and  reminded  people  of 
sunbursts.  They  made  me  look  as  though 
my  hair  were  trying  to  pull  itself  out  by 
the  roots  and  escape.  So  I  was  sent  to  the 
barber's.  My  little  cousin,  two  years 
younger,  went  along  in  my  charge.  It  was 
thought  that  the  performance  might  enter 
tain  her.  I  was  mounted  in  a  chair  and  had 
a  cloth  tucked  in  round  my  neck,  like  a  self- 


Hair  77 

made  millionaire  about  to  eat  consomme. 
The  officiating  barber  got  out  a  shiny  steel 
instrument  with  jaws — the  first  pair  of  clip 
pers  I  had  ever  seen — and  he  ran  this  up 
the  back  of  my  neck,  producing  a  most 
agreeable  feeling.  He  reached  the  top  of 
my  head  and  would  have  paused,  but  I  told 
him  to  go  right  ahead  and  clip  me  close  all 
over,  which  he  did.  When  he  had  finished 
the  job  I  was  so  delighted  with  the  sensation 
and  with  the  attendant  result  as  viewed  in 
a  mirror  that  I  suggested  he  might  give  my 
little  cousin  a  similar  treat.  From  a  mere 
child  I  was  ever  so — willing  always  to  share 
my  simple  pleasures  with  those  about  me, 
especially  where  it  entailed  no  inconvenience 
on  my  part.  I  told  him  my  father  would 
pay  the  bill  for  both  of  us  when  he  came 
by  that  night. 

The  barber  fell  in  with  the  suggestion. 
It  has  ever  been  my  experience  that  a 
barber  will  fall  in  readily  with  any  sug 
gestion  whereby  the  barber  is  going  to 
get  something  out  of  it  for  himself.  In 
this  instance  he  was  going  to  get  another 
quarter,  and  a  quarter  went  farther  in 


18         Cob  IS  s  diiatomy 

those  days  than  it  does  now.  I  dismounted 
from  the  chair  and  my  innocent  little 
cousin  was  installed  in  my  place.  As 
I  now  recall  she  made  no  protest.  The 
barber  ran  his  clippers  conscientiously  and 
painstakingly  over  her  tender  young  scalp, 
while  I  stood  admiringly  by  and  watched 
the  long  yellow  curls  fall  writhing  upon 
the  floor  at  my  feet.  It  seemed  to  me  that 
a  great  and  manifest  improvement  was  pro 
duced  in  her  general  appearance.  Instead 
of  being  hampered  by  those  silly  curls  dang 
ling  down  all  round  her  face,  she  now  had  a 
round,  slick,  smooth  dome  decorated  with  a 
stiff  yellowish  stubble,  and  the  skin  showed 
through  nice  and  pink  and  the  ears  were 
well  displayed,  whereas  before  they  had 
been  practically  hidden.  She  was  also 
relieved  of  those  foolish  bangs  hanging  down 
in  her  eyes.  This,  I  should  have  stated, 
occurred  in  the  period  when  womankind 
of  whatsoever  age  and  also  some  men  wore 
bangs,  a  disease  from  which  all  have  since 
recovered  with  the  exception  of  racehorses 
and  princesses  of  the  various  reigning  houses 
of  Europe.  And  now  my  little  cousin  was 


"WHILE  I  STOOD  ADMIRINGLY  BY  AND  WATCHED  THE 
LONG  YELLOW  CURLS  FALL  WRITHING  UPON  THE  FLOOR' 


Hair  81 

shut  of  those  annoying  bangs,  and  her  fore 
head  ran  up  so  high  that  you  had  to  go 
round  behind  her  to  see  where  it  left  off. 

Filled  with  a  joyous  sense  of  achievement 
and  conscious  of  a  kindly  deed  worthily  per 
formed,  I  took  my  little  cousin  by  her  hand 
and  led  her  home. 

My  mother  was  waiting  for  us  at  the  front 
door.  She  seemed  surprised  when  I  took  off 
my  hat  and  gave  her  a  look,  but  that  wasn't 
a  circumstance  to  her  surprise  when  I 
proudly  took  off  my  little  cousin's  cap.  She 
uttered  a  kind  of  a  strangled  cry  and  my 
cousin's  mother  came  running,  and  the  way 
she  carried  on  was  scandalous  and  illtimed. 
I  will  draw  a  veil  over  the  proceedings  of 
the  next  few  minutes.  At  the  time  it  would 
have  been  a  source  of  great  personal  grati 
fication  and  comfort  to  me  if  I  could  have 
drawn  a  number  of  veils,  good,  thick, 
woolen  ones,  over  the  proceedings.  My 
mother  wept,  my  aunt  wept,  my  little  cousin 
wept,  and  I  am  not  ashamed  to  state  that  I 
wept  quite  copiously  myself.  But  I  had 
more  provocation  to  weep  than  any  of  them. 


82         Cobles  .4  mi  tow y 

When  this  part  of  the  affair  was  over  my 
mother  sent  me  back  to  the  barber  with  a 
message.  I  was  to  say  that  a  heart-broken 
woman  demanded  to  have  the  curls  of 
which  her  darling  child  had  been  denuded. 
I  believe  that  there  was  some  idea  enter 
tained  of  sewing  them  into  a  cap  and  re 
quiring  my  cousin  to  wear  the  cap  until 
new  ones  had  sprouted.  Even  to  me,  a  mere 
child  of  eight,  this  seemed  a  foolish  and  to 
tally  unnecessary  proceeding,  but  the  situa 
tion  had  already  become  so  strained  that  I 
thought  it  the  part  of  prudence  to  go  at 
once  without  offering  any  arguments  of  my 
own.  I  felt,  anyhow,  that  I  would  rather 
be  away  from  the  house  for  a  while,  until 
calmer  second  judgment  had  succeeded  ex 
citement  and  tumult. 

The  man  who  owned  the  barber  shop 
seemed  surprised  when  I  delivered  the  mes 
sage,  but  he  told  me  to  come  back  in  a  few 
minutes  and  he'd  do  what  he  could.  I 
drifted  on  down  to  the  confectionery  store 
at  the  corner  to  forget  my  sorrows  for  the 
moment  in  a  worshipful  admiration  of  a 
display  of  prize  boxes  and  cracknels  in 


"  THE  WAY  SHE  CARRIED  ON 

WAS  SCANDALOUS  AND  ILL-TIMED 


Hair  85 

glass-front  cases — you  should  be  able  to  fix 
the  period  by  the  fact  that  cracknels  and 
prize  boxes  were  still  in  vogue  among  the 
young.  When  I  returned  the  head  barber 
handed  me  quite  a  large  box — a  shoebox — 
with  a  string  tied  round  it.  It  did  not  seem 
possible  to  me  that  my  cousin  could  have 
had  a  whole  shoebox  full  of  curls,  but 
things  had  been  going  pretty  badly  that 
afternoon  and  my  motives  had  been  mis 
judged  and  everything,  so  without  any  talk 
I  took  the  box  and  hurried  home  with  it. 
My  mother  cut  the  string  and  my  aunt 
lifted  the  lid. 

I  should  prefer  again  to  draw  a  veil  over 
the  scenes  that  now  ensued,  but  the  necessity 
of  finishing  this  narrative  requires  me  to 
state  that  it  being  a  Saturday  and  the  head 
barber  being  a  busy  man,  he  had  not  taken 
time  to  sort  out  my  cousin's  curls  from 
among  the  flotsam  and  jetsam  of  his  estab 
lishment,  but  had  just  swept  up  enough  off 
the  floor  to  make  a  good  assorted  boxful.  I 
think  the  oldest  inhabitant  had  probably 
dropped  in  that  day  to  have  himself  trim 
med  up  a  little  round  the  edges.  I  seem  to 


86          Cohh\s 


remember  a  quantity  of  sandy  whiskers  shot 
with  gray.  There  was  enough  hair  in  that 
box  and  enough  different  kinds  and  colors  of 
hair  and  stuff  to  satisfy  almost  any  taste,  you 
would  have  thought,  but  my  mother  and 
aunt  were  anything  but  satisfied.  On  the 
contrary,  far  from  it.  And  yet  my  cousin's 
hair  was  all  there,  if  they  had  only  been 
willing  to  spend  a  few  days  sorting  it  out 
and  separating  it  from  the  other  contents. 

In  this  particular  instance  I  was  the  ex 
ception  to  the  rule,  that  hair  generally  gives 
a  boy  no  great  trouble  from  the  time  he 
merges  out  of  babyhood  until  he  puts  on 
long  pants  and  begins  to  discern  something 
strangely  and  subtly  attractive  about  the  sex 
described  by  Mr.  Kipling  as  being  the  more 
deadly  of  the  species.  During  this  interim 
it  is  a  matter  of  no  moment  to  a  boy  whether 
he  goes  shaggy  or  cropped,  shorn  or  un 
shorn.  At  intervals  a  frugal  parent  trims 
him  to  see  if  both  his  ears  are  still  there,  or 
else  a  barber  does  it  with  more  thorough 
ness,  often  recovering  small  articles  of 
household  use  that  have  been  mysteriously 
missing  for  months;  but  in  the  main  he  goes 


Hair  87 

along  carefree  and  unbarbered,  not  greatly 
concerned  with  putting  anything  in  his  head 
or  taking  anything  off  of  it. 

In  due  season,  though,  he  reaches  the  age 
where  adolescent  whiskers  and  young  ro 
mance  begin  to  sprout  out  on  him  simulta 
neously — and  from  that  moment  on  for  the 
rest  of  his  life  his  hair  is  giving  him  bother, 
and  plenty  of  it. 

Your  hair  gives  you  bother  as  long  as  you 
have  it  and  more  bother  when  it  starts  to  go. 
You  are  always  doing  something  for  it  and 
it  is  always  showing  deep-dyed  ingratitude 
in  return;  or  else  the  dye  isn't  deep  enough, 
which  is  even  worse.  Hair  is  responsible 
for  such  byproducts  as  dandruff,  barbers, 
wigs,  several  comic  weeklies,  mental  an 
guish,  added  expense,  Chinese  revolutions, 
and  the  standard  joke  about  your  wife's 
using  your  best  razor  to  open  a  can  of  to 
matoes  with.  Hair  has  been  of  aid  to  Buf 
falo  Bill,  Little  Lord  Fauntleroy,  Samson, 
The  Lady  Godiva,  Jo-Jo,  the  Dog-Faced 
Boy,  poets,  pianists,  some  artists  and  most 
mattress  makers,  but  a  drawback  and  a  sor- 


88 


row  to  Absalom,  polar  bears  in  captivity 
and  the  male  sex  in  general. 

This  assertion  goes  not  only  for  hair  on 
the  head  but  for  hair  on  the  face.  Let  us 
consider  for  a  moment  the  matter  of  shav 
ing.  If  you  shave  yourself  you  excite  a 
barber's  contempt,  and  there  is  nobody 
whose  contempt  the  average  man  dreads 
more  than  a  barber's,  unless  it  is  a  waiter's. 
And  on  the  other  hand,  if  you  let  a  barber 
shave  you  he  excites  not  your  contempt  par 
ticularly,  but  your  rage  and  frequently  your 
undying  hatred.  Once  in  a  burst  of  confi 
dence  a  barber  told  me  one  of  the  trade 
secrets  of  his  profession  —  he  said  that 
among  barbers  every  face  fell  into  one  of 
three  classes,  it  being  either  a  square,  a 
round  or  a  squirrel.  I  know  not,  reader, 
whether  yours  be  a  square  or  a  round  or  a 
squirrel,  but  this  much  I  will  chance  on  a 
venture,  sight  unseen  —  that  you  have  your 
periods  of  intense  unhappiness  when  you 
are  being  shaved. 

I  do  not  refer  so  much  to  the  actual  pro 
cess  of  being  shaved.  Indeed  there  is  some 
thing  restful  and  soothing  to  the  average 


"EVERY  FACE  FELL  INTO  ONE  OF  THREE  CLASSES,  IT  BEING 
EITHER  A  SQUARE,  A  ROUND  OR  A  SQUIRREL" 


Hair  91 

male  adult  in  the  feel  of  a  sharp  razor  being 
guided  over  a  bristly  jowl  by  a  deft  and 
skillful  hand,  to  the  accompaniment  of  a 
gentle  grating  sound  and  followed  by  a  sen 
sation  of  transient  silken  smoothness.  Nor 
do  I  refer  to  the  barber's  habit  of  conversa 
tion.  After  all,  a  barber  is  human — he  has 
to  talk  to  somebody,  and  it  might  as  well  be 
you.  If  he  didn't  have  you  to  talk  to  he'd 
have  to  talk  to  another  barber,  and  that 
would  be  no  treat  to  him. 

What  I  do  refer  to  is  that  which  precedes 
a  shave  and  more  especially  that  which  fol 
lows  after  it.  You  rush  in  for  a  shave.  In 
ten  minutes  you  have  an  engagement  to  be 
married  or  something  else  important,  and 
you  want  a  shave  and  you  want  it  quick. 
Does  the  barber  take  cognizance  of  the 
emergency?  He  does  not.  Such  would  be 
contrary  to  the  ethics  of  his  calling.  Know 
ing  from  your  own  lips  that  you  want  a 
shave  and  that's  positively  all,  he  neverthe 
less  is  instantly  filled  with  a  burning  desire 
to  equip  you  with  a  large  number  of  other 
things.  In  this  regard  the  barbering  pro 
fession  has  much  in  common  with  the  hab- 


92        Cob  IS  s 


erdashering  or  gents'-furnishing  profession 
as  practiced  in  our  larger  cities.  You  in 
vade  a  haberdashering  establishment  for  the 
purpose,  let  us  say,  of  investing  in  a  plain 
and  simple  pair  of  half  hose,  price  twenty- 
five  cents.  That  emphatically  is  all  that 
you  do  desire.  You  so  state  in  plain, 
simple  language,  using  the  shorter  and 
uglier  word  socks. 

Does  the  youth  in  the  pale  mauve  shirt 
with  the  marquise  ring  on  the  little  finger 
of  the  left  hand  rest  content  with  this?  Need 
I  answer  this  question?  In  succession  he 
tries  to  sell  you  a  fancy  waistcoat  with 
large  pearl  buttons,  a  broken  lot  of  silk  pa 
jamas,  a  bath-robe,  some  shrimp-pink  un 
derwear  —  he  wears  this  kind  himself  he 
tells  you  in  strict  confidence  —  a  pair  of 
plush  suspenders  and  a  knitted  necktie  that 
you  wouldn't  be  caught  wearing  at  twelve 
o'clock  at  night  at  the  bottom  of  a  coal  mine 
during  a  total  eclipse  of  the  moon.  If  you 
resist  his  blandishments  and  so  far  forget 
that  you  are  a  gentleman  as  to  use  harsh 
language,  and  if  you  insist  on  a  pair  of 
socks  and  nothing  else,  he'll  let  you  have 


Hair 93_ 

them,  but  he  will  never  feel  the  same  to 
ward  you  as  he  did. 

Tis  much  the  same  with  a  barber.  You 
need  a  shave  in  a  hurry  and  he  is  willing 
that  you  should  have  a  shave,  he  being  there 
for  that  purpose,  but  first  and  last  he  can 
think  of  upward  of  thirty  or  forty  other 
things  that  you  ought  to  have,  including  a 
shampoo,  a  hair  cut,  a  hair  singe,  a  hair 
tonic,  a  hair  oil,  a  manicure,  a  facial  mas 
sage,  a  scalp  massage,  a  Turkish  bath,  his 
opinion  on  the  merits  of  the  newest  White 
Hope,  a  shoeshine,  some  kind  of  a  skin  food, 
and  a  series  of  comparisons  of  the  weather 
we  are  having  this  time  this  month  with  the 
weather  we  were  having  this  time  last 
month.  Not  all  of  us  are  gifted  with  the 
power  of  repartee  by  which  my  friend  Fris- 
bee  turned  the  edge  of  the  barber's  desires. 

"Your  hair,"  said  the  barber,  fondling  a 
truant  lock,  "is  long." 

"I  know  it  is,"  said  Frisbee.  "I  like  it 
long.  It's  so  Roycrofty." 

"It  is  very  long,"  said  the  barber  with  a 
wistful  expression. 

"I  like  it  very  long,"  said  Frisbee.       "I 


94 


like  to  have  people  come  up  to  me  on  the 
street  and  call  me  Mr.  Sutherland  and  ask 
me  how  I  left  my  sisters?  1  like  to  be  mis 
taken  for  a  Russian  pianist.  I  like  for 
strangers  to  stop  me  and  ask  me  how's  every 
thing  up  at  East  Aurora.  In  short,  I  like 
it  long." 

"Yes,  sir,"  said  the  barber,  uquite  so,  sir; 
but  it's  very  long,  particularly  here  in  the 
back  —  it  covers  your  coat  collar." 

"Indeed?"  said  Frisbee.  uYou  say  it 
covers  my  coat  collar?" 

"Yes,  sir,"  said  the  barber.  "You  can't 
see  the  coat  collar  at  all." 

"Have  you  got  a  good  sharp  pair  of  shears 
there?"  said  Frisbee. 

"Oh,  yes,  sir,"  said  the  barber. 

"All  right  then,"  said  Frisbee;  "cut  the 
collar  off." 

But  not  all  of  us,  as  I  said  before,  have 
this  ready  gift  of  parry  and  thrust  that  dis 
tinguishes  my  friend  Frisbee.  Mostly  \\  e 
weakly  surrender.  Or  if  we  refuse  to  sur 
render,  demanding  just  a  shave  by  itself 
and  nothing  else,  what  then  follows?  In 
my  own  case,  speaking  personally,  I  know 


Hair 95 

exactly  what  follows.  I  do  not  like  to  have 
any  powder  dabbed  on  my  face  when  I  am 
through  shaving.  I  believe  in  letting  the 
bloom  of  youth  show  through  your  skin, 
providing  you  have  any  bloom  of  youth  to 
do  so.  I  always  take  pains  to  state  my  views 
in  this  regard  at  least  twice  during  the  oper 
ation  of  being  shaved — once  at  the  start 
when  the  barber  has  me  all  lathered  up, 
with  soapsuds  dripping  from  the  flanges  of 
my  shell-like  ears  and  running  down  my 
neck,  and  once  again  toward  the  close  of 
the  operation,  when  he  has  laid  aside  his 
razor  and  is  sousing  my  defenseless  features 
in  a  liquid  that  smells  and  tastes  a  good  deal 
like  those  scented  pink  blotters  they  used  to 
give  away  at  drug-stores  to  advertise  some 
body's  cologne. 

Does  the  barber  respect  my  wishes  in  this 
regard?  Certainly  not.  He  insists  on  pow 
dering  me,  either  before  my  eyes  or  surrep 
titiously  and  in  a  clandestine  manner.  If 
he  didn't  powder  me  up  he  would  lose  his 
sense  of  self-respect,  and  probably  the  union 
would  take  his  card  away  from  him.  I 
think  there  is  something  in  the  constitution 


96          Cobb^s  Anatomy 

and  by-laws  requiring  that  I  be  powdered 
up.  I  have  fought  the  good  fight  for  years, 
but  I'm  always  powdered.  Sometimes  the 
crafty  foe  dissembles.  He  pretends  that  he 
is  not  going  to  powder  me  up.  But  all  of  a 
sudden  when  my  back  is  turned,  as  it  were, 
he  grabs  up  his  powder  swab  and  makes  a 
quick  swoop  upon  me  and  the  hellish  deed 
is  done.  I  should  be  pleased  to  hear  from 
other  victims  of  this  practice  suggesting  any 
practical  relie-f  short  of  homicide.  I  do  not 
wish  to  kill  a  barber — there  are  several  other 
orders  in  ahead,  referring  to  the  persons  I 
intend  to  kill  off  first — but  I  may  be  driven 
to  it. 

After  he  has  gashed  me  casually  hither 
and  yon,  and  sluiced  down  my  helpless 
countenance  with  the  carefree  abandon  of 
a  livery-stable  hand  washing  off  a  buggy, 
and  after,  as  above  stated,  he  has  covered  up 
the  traces  of  his  crime  with  powder,  the  bar 
ber  next  takes  a  towel  and  folds  it  over  his 
right  hand,  as  prescribed  in  the  rules  and 
regulations,  and  then  he  dabs  me  with  that 
towel  on  various  parts  of  my  face  nine  hun 
dred  and  seventy-four — 974 — separate  and 


""WHEN  MY  BACK  IS  TURNED  HE  GRABS  UP  HIS  POWDER 
SWAB  AND  MAKES  A  QUICK  SWOOP  UPON  ME" 


Hair 99_ 

distinct  times.  I  know  the  exact  number  of 
dabs  because  I  have  taken  the  trouble  to 
keep  count.  I  may  be  in  as  great  a  hurry  as 
you  can  imagine;  I  may  be  but  a  poor  ner 
vous  wreck  already,  as  I  am ;  I  may  be  quiv 
ering  to  be  up  and  away  from  there,  but  he 
dabs  me  with  his  towel — he  dabs  me  until 
reason  totters  on  her  throne — sometimes  just 
a  tiny  tot,  as  the  saying  goes,  or  it  may  be 
that  the  whole  cerebral  structure  is  involved 
—and  then  when  he  is  apparently  all 
through  the  Demoniac  Dabber  comes  back 
and  dabs  me  one  more  fiendish,  deliberate 
and  premeditated  dab,  making  nine  hun 
dred  and  seventy-five  dabs  in  all.  He  has  to 
do  it;  it's  in  the  ritual  that  I  and  you  and 
everybody  must  have  that  last  dab.  I  won 
der  how  many  gibbering  idiots  there  are  in 
the  asylum  today  whose  reason  was  over 
thrown  by  being  dabbed  that  last  farewell 
dab.  I  know  from  my  own  experience  that 
I  can  feel  the  little  dark-green  gibbers  slosh 
ing  round  inside  of  me  every  time  it  hap 
pens,  and  some  day  my  mind  will  give  away 
altogether  and  there'll  be  a  hurry  call  sent 
in  for  the  wagon  with  the  lock  on  the  back 


100       Co b IS s  Anatomy 

door.  Yet  it  is  of  no  avail  to  cavil  or  pro 
test;  we  cannot  hope  to  escape;  we  can  only 
sit  there  in  mute  and  helpless  misery  and  be 
filled  with  a  great  envy  for  Mexican  hair 
less  dogs. 

For  quite  a  spell  now  we  have  been  speak 
ing  of  hair  on  the  face;  at  this  point  we  re 
vert  to  hair  in  its  relation  to  the  head. 
There  are  some  few  among  us,  mainly  pro 
fessional  Southerners  and  leading  men,  who 
retain  the  bulk  of  the  hair  on  their  heads 
through  life;  but  with  most  of  us  the  cir 
cumstances  are  different.  Your  hair  goes 
from  you.  You  don't  seem  to  notice  it  at  first ; 
then  all  of  a  sudden  you  wake  up  to  the 
realization  that  your  head  is  working  its 
way  up  through  the  hair.  You  start  in  then 
desperately  doing  things  for  your  hair  in  the 
hope  of  inducing  it  to  stick  round  the  old 
place  a  while  longer,  but  it  has  heard  the 
call  of  the  wild  and  it  is  on  its  way.  There's 
no  detaining  it.  You  soak  your  skull  in  lo 
tions  until  your  brain  softens  and  your  hat 
band  gets  moldy  from  the  damp,  but  your 
hair  keeps  right  on  going. 

After  a  while  it  is  practically  gone.     If 


Hair 


only  about  two-thirds  of  it  is  gone  your  Head 
looks  like  a  great  auk's  egg  in  a  snug  nest; 
but  if  most  of  it  goes  there  is  something 
about  you  that  suggests  the  Glacial  Period, 
with  an  icy  barren  peak  rising  high  above 
the  vegetation  line,  where  a  thin  line  of 
heroic  strands  still  cling  to  the  slopes.  You 
are  bald  then,  a  subject  fit  for  the  japes  of 
the  wicked  and  universally  coupled  in  the 
betting  with  onions,  with  hard-boiled  eggs 
and  with  the  front  row  of  orchestra  chairs 
at  a  musical  show. 

At  this  time  of  writing  baldness  is  creep 
ing  insidiously  up  each  side  of  my  head.  It 
is  executing  flank  movements  from  the  tem 
ples  northward,  and  some  day  the  two  col 
umns  will  meet  and  after  that  I'll  be  con 
siderably  more  of  a  highbrow  than  I  am 
now.  At  present  I  am  craftily  combing  the 
remaining  thatch  in  the  middle  and  smooth 
ing  it  out  nice  and  flat,  so  as  to  keep  those 
bare  spots  covered — thinly  perhaps,  but  nev 
ertheless  covered.  It  is  my  earnest  desire 
to  continue  to  keep  them  covered.  I  am  not 
a  professional  beauty;  I  am  not  even 
what  you  would  call  a  good  amateur 


102        Cob  IS  s 


beauty;  and  I  want  to  make  what  little 
hair  1  have  go  as  far  as  it  conveniently 
can.  But  does  the  barber  to  whom  1 
repair  at  frequent  intervals  coincide  with 
my  desires  in  this  respect?  Again  I  reply 
he  does  not.  Every  time  I  go  in  I  speak 
to  him  about  it.  I  say  to  him:  "Woodman, 
spare  that  hair,  touch  not  a  single  strand  ; 
in  youth  it  sheltered  me  and  I'll  protect  it 
now."  Or  in  substance  that. 

He  says  yes,  he  will,  but  he  doesn't  mean 
it.  He  waits  until  he  can  catch  me  with  my 
guard  down.  Then  he  seizes  a  comb,  and 
using  the  edge  of  his  left  hand  as  a  bevel  and 
operating  his  right  with  a  sort  of  free-arm 
Spencerian  movement,  he  roaches  my  hair 
up  in  a  scallop  effect  on  either  side,  and 
upon  reaching  the  crest  he  fights  with  it  and 
wrestles  with  it  until  he  makes  it  stand  erect 
in  a  feather-edged  design.  I  can  tell  by  his 
c  \pression  that  he  is  pleased  with  this  ar 
rangement.  He  loves  to  send  his  victim^ 
forth  into  the  world  tufted  like  the  fretful 
cockatoo.  He  likes  to  see  surging  waves  of 
hair  dash  high  on  a  stern  and  rockbound 


Hair  103 

head.  His  sense  of  the  artistic  demands 
such  a  result. 

What  cares  he  how  I  feel  about  it  so  long 
as  the  higher  cravings  of  his  own  nature 
are  satisfied?  But  I  resent  it — I  resent  it 
bitterly.  I  object  to  having  my  head  look 
like  a  real-estate  development  with  an  open 
ing  for  a  new  street  going  up  each  side  and 
an  ornamental  design  in  fancy  landscape 
gardening  across  the  top.  If  I  permit  this 
I  won't  be  able  to  keep  on  saying  that  I  was 
twenty-seven  on  my  last  birthday,  with  some 
hope  of  getting  away  with  it.  So  I  insist 
that  he  put  my  front  hair  right  back  where 
he  found  it.  He  does  so,  under  protest  and 
begrudgingly,  it  is  true,  but  he  does  it.  And 
then,  watching  his  opportunity,  he  runs  in 
on  me  and  overpowers  me  and  roaches  it  up 
some  more. 

If  I  weaken  and  submit  he  is  happy  as 
the  day  is  long.  If  he  gets  it  roached  up 
on  both  sides  that  will  make  me  look  like  a 
horizontal-bar  performer,  which  is  his  idea 
of  manly  beauty.  Or  if  he  gets  it  roached 
up  on  one  side  only  there  is  still  some  con 
solation  in  it  for  him — I'm  liable  to  be 


104        Cobles 


mistaken  anywhere  for  a  trained-animal 
performer.  But  once  in  a  very  great  while 
he  doesn't  get  it  roached  up  on  either  side, 
but  has  to  stand  there  and  suffer  as  he  sees 
me  walk  forth  into  the  world  with  my  hair 
combed  to  suit  me  and  not  him.  I  can  tell 
by  his  look  that  he  is  grieved  and  downcast, 
and  that  he  will  probably  go  home  and  be 
cross  to  the  children.  He  has  but  one  solace 
—he  hopes  to  have  better  luck  with  me  next 
time.  And  probably  he  will. 

The  last  age  of  hair  is  a  \vig.  But  wigs 
are  not  so  very  satisfactory  either.  I've 
seen  all  the  known  varieties  of  wigs,  and  I 
never  saw  one  yet  that  looked  as  though  it 
were  even  on  speaking  terms  with  the  head 
that  was  under  it.  A  \vig  always  looks  as 
though  it  were  a  total  stranger  to  the  head 
and  had  just  lit  there  a  minute  to  rest,  pre 
paratory  to  flying  along  to  the  next  head. 
Nevertheless,  I  think  on  the  whole  I'll  be 
happier  when  my  time  comes  to  wear  one, 
because  then  no  barber  can  roach  me  up. 


Cobb^s  Anatomy 


HANDS  AND  FEET 


Cobb's  Anatomy 


Hands  and  Feet 

NEARLY  every  boy  has  a  period  in 
his  life  when  he  is  filled  with  an  en 
vious  admiration  for  the  East  India 
god  with  the  extra  set  of  arms — Vishnu,  I 
think  this  party's  name  is.  To  a  small  boy 
it  seems  a  grand  thing  to  have  a  really  ade 
quate  assortment  of  hands.  He  considers 
the  advantage  of  such  an  arrangement  in 
school — two  hands  in  plain  viewr  above  the 
desk  holding  McGuffy's  Fourth  Reader  at 
the  proper  angle  for  study  and  the  other 
two  out  of  sight,  down  underneath  the  desk 
engaged  in  manufacturing  paper  wads  or 
playing  crack-a-loo  or  some  other  really 
worth  while  employment. 

Or  for  robbing  birds'  nests.  There  would 
be  two  hands  for  use  in  skinning  up  the 
tree,  and  one  hand  for  scaring  off  the 
mother  bird  and  one  hand  for  stealing  the 


110       Cob  IS  s 


eggs-  And  for  hanging  on  behind  wagons 
the  combination  positively  could  not  be 
beaten.  Then  there  would  be  the  gaudy 
conspicuousness  of  going  around  with  four 
arms  weaving  in  and  out  in  a  kind  of  spid 
ery  effect  while  less  favored  boys  were 
forced  to  content  themselves  with  just  an 
ordinary  and  insufficient  pair.  Really, 
there  was  only  one  drawback  to  the  contem 
plation  of  this  scheme  —  there'd  be  twice  as 
many  hands  to  wash  when  company  was 
coming  to  dinner. 

Generally  speaking  a  boy's  hands  give 
him  no  serious  concern  during  the  first  few 
years  of  his  life  except  at  such  times  as  his 
mother  grows  officious  and  fussy  and  insists 
that  they  ought  to  be  washed  up  as  far  as 
the  regular  place  for  washing  a  boy's  hands, 
to  wit,  about  midway  between  the  knuckles 
and  the  wrist.  The  fact  that  one  finger  is 
usually  in  a  state  of  mashedness  is  no  draw 
back,  but  a  benefit.  The  presence  of  a 
soiled  rag  around  a  finger  gives  to  a  boy's 
hand  a  touch  of  distinctiveness  —  singles 
it  out  from  ordinary  unmaimed  hands.  Its 
presence  has  been  known  to  excuse  its  happy 


THERE'D  BE  TWICE  AS  MANY  HANDS  TO  WASH 
WHEN  COMPANY  WAS  COMING  TO  DINNER" 


Hands  and  Feet       113 

possessor  from  such  chores  as  bringing  in 
wood  for  the  kitchen  stove  or  pulling  dock 
weeds  out  of  the  grass  in  a  front  yard  where 
it  would  be  much  easier  and  quicker  to 
pull  the  grass  out  of  the  dock  weeds.  It  may 
even  be  made  a  source  of  profit  by  removing 
the  wrappings  and  charging  two  china  mar 
bles  a  look.  I  seem  to  recall  that  in  the  case 
of  a  specially  attractive  injury,  such  as  a 
thumb  nail  knocked  off  or  a  deep  cut  which 
has  refused  to  heal  by  first  intention  or  an 
imbedded  splinter  in  process  of  being 
drawn  out  by  a  scrap  of  fat  meat,  that  as 
much  as  four  china  marbles  could  be 
charged. 

On  the  Fourth  of  July  you  occasionally 
burned  your  hands  and  in  cold  winters  they 
chapped  extensively  across  the  knuckles  but 
these  were  but  the  marks  and  scars  of  hon 
orable  endeavor  and  a  hardy  endurance. 
In  our  set  the  boy  whose  knuckles  had  the 
deepest  cracks  in  them  was  a  prominent  and 
admired  figure,  crowned,  as  you  might  say, 
with  an  imaginery  chaplet  by  reason  of  his 
chaps. 

With   girls,   of   course,   it  was   different. 


114       Cobb's  Anatomy 

Girls  were  superfluous  and  unnecessary 
creatures  with  a  false  and  inflated  idea  of 
the  value  of  soap  and  water.  Their  hands 
weren't  good  for  much  anyway.  Later  on 
we  discovered  that  a  girl's  hands  were  ex 
cellent  for  holding  purposes  in  a  hammock 
or  while  coming  back  from  a  straw  ride, 
but  I  am  speaking  now  of  the  earlier  stages 
of  our  development,  before  the  presence  of 
the  ostensibly  weaker  sex  began  to  awaken 
responsive  throbs  in  our  several  bosoms — in 
short  when  girls  were  merely  nuisances  and 
things  to  be  ignored  whenever  possible.  In 
that  early  stage  of  his  existence  hands  have 
no  altruistic  or  sentimental  or  ornamental 
value  for  a  boy — they  are  for  useful  pur 
poses  altogether  and  are  regarded  as  such. 

It  is  only  when  he  has  reached  the  age 
of  tail  coats  and  spike-fence  collars  that  he 
discovers  two  hands  are  frequently  too 
many  and  often  not  enough.  They  are  too 
many  at  your  first  church  wedding  when 
you  are  wearing  your  first  pair  of  white 
kids  and  they  are  not  enough  at  a  five 
o'clock  tea.  There  is  a  type  of  male  who 
can  go  to  a  five  o'clock  tea  and  not  tall 


"THE  PRESENCE  OF  A  SOILED  RAG  ROUND  A  FINGER 
GIVES  TO  A  BOY'S  HAND  A  TOUCH  OF  DISTINCTIVENESS' 


Hands  and  Feet        11 7 

over  a  lot  of  Louie  Kahn's  furniture  or  get 
himself  hopelessly  tangled  up  in  a  hanging 
drapery  and  who  can  seem  perfectly  at  ease 
while  holding  in  his  hands  a  walking  stick, 
a  pair  of  dove  colored  gloves,  a  two-quart 
hat,  a  cup  of  tea  with  a  slice  of  lemon  peel 
in  it,  a  tea  spoon,  a  lump  of  sugar,  a  seed 
cookie,  an  olive,  and  the  hand  of  a  lady  with 
whom  he  is  discussing  the  true  meaning  of 
the  message  of  the  late  Ibsen;  but  these 
gifted  mortals  are  not  common.  They  are 
rare  and  exotic.  There  are  also  some  few 
who  can  do  ushing  at  a  church  wedding  with 
a  pair  of  white  kids  on  and  not  appear 
overly  self-conscious.  These  are  also  the 
exceptions.  The  great  majority  of  us  suffer 
visibly  under  such  circumstances.  You 
have  the  feeling  that  each  hand  weighs  fully 
twenty-four  pounds  and  that  it  is  hanging 
out  of  the  sleeve  for  a  distance  of  about  one 
and  three-quarters  yards  and  you  don't  know 
what  to  do  with  your  hands  and  on  the 
whole  would  feel  much  more  comfortable 
and  decorative  if  they  were  both  sawed  off 
at  the  wrists  and  hidden  some  place  where 
you  couldn't  find  'em.  You  have  that  feel- 


11 X      Cob  IS  s  Anatomy 

ing  and  you  look  it.  You  look  as  though 
you  were  working  in  a  plaster  of  paris  fac 
tory  and  were  carrying  home  a  couple  of 
large  sacks  of  samples.  It  would  be  grand 
to  be  a  Vishnu  at  a  five  o'clock  tea,  but  aw 
ful  to  be  one  at  a  church  wedding. 

About  the  time  you  find  yourself  em 
barking  on  a  career  of  teas  and  weddings 
you  also  begin  to  find  yourself  worrying 
about  the  appearance  of  your  hands.  Up 
until  now  the  hands  have  given  you  no  great 
concern  one  way  or  the  other,  but  some  day 
you  wake  to  the  realization  that  you  need  to 
be  manicured.  Once  you  catch  that  disease 
there  is  no  hope  for  you.  There  are  ways  of 
curing  you  of  almost  any  habit  except  mani 
curing.  You  get  so  that  you  aren't  satisfied 
unless  your  nails  run  down  about  a  quarter 
of  an  inch  further  than  nails  were  originally 
intended  to  run,  and  unless  they  glitter 
heck  \ou  feel  strangely  distraught  in  com 
pany.  Inasmuch  as  no  male  creature'* 
finger  nails  will  glitter  with  the  desired  de 
gree  of  brilliancy  for  more  than  twenty- 
four  short  and  fleeting  hours  after  a  treat 
ment  you  find  \ourself  constantly  in  the  act 


THESE  GIFTED  MORTALS  ARE  NOT  COMMON" 


Hands  and  Feet       121 

of  either  just  getting  a  manicure  or  just 
getting  over  one.  It  is  an  expensive  habit, 
too ;  it  takes  time  and  it  takes  money. 
There's  the  fixed  charge  for  manicuring  in 
the  first  place  and  then  there's  the  tip. 
Once  there  was  a  manicure  lady  who 
wouldn't  take  a  tip,  but  she  is  now  no  more. 
Her  indignant  sisters  stabbed  her  to  death 
with  hat  pins  and  nail-files.  Manicuring 
as  a  public  profession  is  a  comparatively 
recent  development  of  our  civilization.  The 
fathers  of  the  republic  and  the  founders  of 
the  constitution,  which  was  founded  first 
and  has  been  foundering  ever  since  if  you 
can  believe  what  a  lot  of  people  in  Congress 
say — they  knew  nothing  of  manicuring. 
Speaking  by  and  large,  they  only  got  their 
thumbs  wet  when  doing  one  of  three  things 
—taking  a  bath,  going  in  swimming  or  turn 
ing  a  page  in  a  book.  Washington  probably 
was  never  manicured  nor  Jefferson  nor 
Franklin;  it's  a  cinch  that  Daniel  Boone  and 
Israel  Putnam  and  George  Rogers  Clark 
weren't  and  yet  it  is  generally  conceded  that 
they  got  along  fairly  well  without  it.  But 
as  the  campaign  orators  are  forever  pointing 


122        Cobles  .IH atomy 

out  from  the  hustlers  and  the  forum,  this 
is  an  age  calling  for  change  and  advance 
ment.  And  manicuring  is  one  of  the 
advancements  that  likewise  calls  for  the 
change — for  fifty  cents  in  change  anyhow 
and  more  if  you  are  inclined  to  be  generous 
with  the  tip. 

Shall  you  ever  forget  your  first  manicure? 
The  shan'ts  are  unanimously  in  the  majority. 
It  seems  an  easy  thing  to  walk  into  a  mani 
cure  parlor  or  a  barber  shop  and  shove  your 
hands  across  a  little  table  to  a  strange  young 
woman  and  tell  her  to  go  ahead  and  shine 
'em  up  a  bit — the  way  you  hear  old  veteran 
manicurees  saying  it.  It  seems  easy,  I  say, 
and  looks  easy;  but  it  isn't  as  easy  as  it 
seems.  Until  you  get  hardened,  it  requires 
courage  of  a  very  high  order.  You,  the 
abashed  novice,  see  other  men  sitting  in  the 
front  window  of  the  manicure  shop  just  as 
debonair  and  cozy  as  though  they'd  been 
born  and  raised  there,  swapping  the  ready 
repartee  of  the  day  with  dashing  creatures 
of  a  frequently  blonde  aspect,  and  you 
imagine  they  have  always  done  so.  You 
little  know  that  these  persons  who  are  now 


WE  DON'T  KNOW  WHAT  TO  DO  WITH  OUR  HANDS" 


Hands  and  Feet        125 

appearing  so  much  at  home  and  who  can 
snap  out  those  bright,  witty  things  like  "I 
gotcher  Steve/'  and  "Well,  see  who's  here?" 
without  a  moment's  hesitation  and  without 
having  to  stop  and  think  for  the  right  word 
or  the  right  phrase  but  have  it  right  there 
on  the  tip  of  the  tongue — you  little  reck 
that  they  too  passed  through  the  same 
initiation  which  you  now  contemplate.  Yet 
such  is  the  case. 

You  have  dress  rehearsals — private  ones 
—in  your  room.  In  the  seclusion  of  your 
bed  chamber  you  picture  yourself  opening 
the  door  of  the  marble  manicure  hall  and 
stepping  in  with  a  brisk  yet  graceful  tread- 
like  James  K.  Hackett  making  an  entrance 
in  the  first  act — and  glancing  about  you 
casually — like  John  Drew  counting  up  the 
house — and  saying  "Hello  girlies,  how're 
all  the  little  Heart's  Delights  this  after 
noon?"  just  like  that,  and  picking  out  the 
most  sumptuous  and  attractive  of  the  flat 
tered  young  ladies  in  waiting;  and  sinking 
easily  into  the  chair  opposite  her — see 
photos  of  William  Faversham — and  throw 
ing  the  coat  lapels  back,  at  the  same  time 


126 


resting  the  left  hand  clenched  upon  the  up 
per  thigh  with  the  elbow  well  out  —  Donald 
Brian  asking  a  lady  to  waltz—and  offering 
the  right  hand  to  the  favored  female  and 
telling  her  to  go  as  far  as  she  likes  with  it. 
It  sounds  simple  when  you  figuring  it  out 
alone,  but  it  rarely  works  out  that  way  in 
practice.  It  is  my  belief  that  every  woman 
longs  for  the  novelty  of  a  Turkish  bath  and 
every  man  for  the  novelty  of  a  manicure 
long  before  either  dares  to  tackle  it.  I  may 
be  wrong  but  this  is  my  belief.  And  in  the 
case  of  the  man  he  usually  makes  a  num 
ber  of  false  starts. 

You  go  to  the  portals  and  hesitate  and 
then,  stumbling  across  the  threshold,  you 
cither  dive  on  through  to  the  barber  shop— 
if  there  is  a  barber  shop  in  connection  —  or 
else  you  mumble  something  about  being  in 
a  hurry  and  coming  back  again,  and  retreat 
with  all  the  grace  and  ease  that  would  be 
shown  by  a  hard  shell  crab  that  was  trying 
to  back  into  the  mouth  of  a  milkbottle. 
You  are  likely  to  do  this  several  times;  hut 
finally  some  day  you  stick.  You  slump 
down  into  one  of  those  little  chairs  and  otter 


Hands  and  Feet        121 

your  hands  or  one  of  them  to  a  calm  and 
slightly  arrogant  looking  young  lady  and 
you  tell  her  to  please  shine  them  up  a  little. 
You  endeavor  to  appear  as  though  you  had 
been  doing  this  at  frequent  periods  stretch 
ing  through  a  great  number  of  years,  but 
she — bless  her  little  heart! — she  knows  bet 
ter  than  that.  The  female  of  the  manicur 
ing  species  is  not  to  be  deceived  by  any  such 
cheap  and  transparent  artifices.  If  you 
wore  a  peekaboo  waist  she  couldn't  see 
through  you  any  easier.  Your  hands  would 
give  you  away  if  your  face  didn't.  In  a 
sibulent  aside,  she  addresses  the  young  lady 
at  the  next  table — the  one  with  the  nine 
bracelets  and  the  hair  done  up  delicatessen 
store  mode — sausages,  rolls  and  buns — - 
whereupon  both  of  them  laugh  in  a  signifi 
cant,  silvery  way,  and  you  feel  the  back  of 
your  neck  setting  your  collar  on  fire.  You 
can  smell  the  bone  button  back  there  scorch 
ing  and  you're  glad  it's  not  celluloid,  cellu 
loid  being  more  inflammable  and  subject  to 
combustion  when  subjected  to  intense  heat. 
When  both  have  laughed  their  merry 


Anatom 


fill,  the  young  woman  who  has  you  in  charge 
looks  you  right  in  the  eye  and  says: 

"Dearie  me;  you'll  pardon  me  saying  so, 
but  your  nails  are  in  a  perfectly  tumble 
state.  I  don't  think  IVe  seen  a  jumpman's 
nails  in  such  a  state  for  ever  so  long.  Par 
don  me  again  —  but  how  long  has  it  been 
since  you  had  them  did?" 

To  which  you  reply  in  what  is  meant  to 
be  a  jaunty  and  off-hand  tone: 

"Oh  quite  some  little  while.  IVe  —  I've 
been  out  of  town." 

"That's  what  I  thought,"  she  says  with  a 
slight  shrug.  It  isn't  so  much  what  she  says 
—it's  the  way  she  says  it,  the  tone  and  all 
that,  which  makes  you  feel  smaller  and 
smaller  until  you  could  crawl  into  your  own 
watch  pocket  and  live  happily  there  ever 
after.  There'd  be  slews  of  room  and  when 
you  wanted  the  air  of  an  evening  you  could 
climb  up  in  a  buttonhole  of  your  vest  and 
be  quite  cosy  and  comfortable.  But  shrink 
as  you  may,  there  is  now  no  hope  of  escape, 
for  she  has  reached  out  and  grabbed  you 
(irmly  by  the  wrist.  She  has  you  fast.  You 
have  a  feeling  that  eight  or  nine  thousand 


"I  DON'T  THINK  I'VE  SEEN  A  JUMPMAN'S  NAILS 
IN  SUCH  A  STATE  FOR  EVER  SO  LONG" 


Hands  and  Feet        131 

people  have  assembled  behind  you  and  are 
all  gazing  fixedly  into  the  small  of  your 
back.  The  only  things  about  you  that  havn't 
shrivelled  up  are  your  hands.  You  can  feel 
them  growing  larger  and  larger  and  redder 
and  redder  and  more  prominent  and  con 
spicuous  every  instant. 

The  lady  begins  operations.  You  are  as 
tonished  to  note  how  many  tools  and  imple 
ments  it  takes  to  manicure  a  pair  of  hands 
properly.  The  top  of  her  little  table  is  full 
of  them  and  she  pulls  open  a  drawer  and 
shows  you  some  more,  ranged  in  rows. 
There  are  files  and  steel  biters  and  pigeon- 
toed  scissors  and  scrapers  and  polishers  and 
things;  and  wads  of  cotton  with  which  to 
staunch  the  blood  of  the  wounded,  and  bot 
tles  of  liquid  and  little  medicinal  looking 
jars  full  of  red  paste;  and  a  cut  glass  crock 
with  soap  suds  in  it  and  a  whole  lot  of  little 
orange  wood  stobbers. 

In  the  interest  of  truth  I  have  taken  the 
pains  to  enquire  and  I  have  ascertained 
that  these  stobbers  are  invariably  of  orange 
wood.  Say  what  you  will,  the  orange  tree 
is  a  hardy  growth.  Every  February  you 


132       Cobles 


read  in  the  papers  that  the  Florida  orange 
crop,  for  the  third  consecutive  time  since 
Christmas  has  been  entirely  and  totally  de 
stroyed  by  frost  and  yet  there  is  always  an 
adequate  supply  on  hand  of  the  principal 
products  of  the  orange  —  phosphate  for  the 
soda  fountains,  blossoms  for  the  bride,  polit 
ical  sentiment  for  the  North  of  Ireland  and 
little  sharp  stobbers  for  the  manicure  lady. 
Speaking  as  an  outsider  I  would  say  that 
there  ought  to  be  other  -varieties  of  wood 
that  would  serve  as  well  and  bring  about  the 
desired  results  as  readily  —  a  good  thorny 
variety  of  poison  ivy  ought  to  fill  the  bill, 
I  should  think.  But  it  seems  that  orange 
wood  is  absolutely  essential.  A  manicure 
lady  could  no  more  do  a  manicure  properly 
without  using  an  orange  wood  stobber  at 
certain  periods  than  a  cartoonist  could  draw 
a  picture  of  a  man  in  jail  without  putting 
a  ball  and  chain  on  him  or  a  summer  resort 
could  get  along  without  a  Lover's  Leap 
within  easy  walking  distance  of  the  hotel. 
It  simply  isn't  done,  that's  all. 

Well,  as  I  was  saying,  she  gets  out  her 
tool  kit  and    goes   to  work  on   you.     You 


Hands  and  Feet        133 

didn't  dream  that  there  were  so  many  things 
—mainly  of  a  painful  nature — that  could  be 
done  to  a  single  finger  nail  and  you  flinch 
as  you  suddenly  remember  that  you  have 
ten  of  them  in  all,  counting  thumbs  in  with 
fingers.  She  takes  a  finger  nail  in  hand  and 
she  files  it  and  she  trims  it  and  she  softens 
it  with  hot  water  and  hardens  it  with  chemi 
cals  and  parboils  it  a  little  while  and  then 
she  cuts  off  the  hang  nails — if  there  aren't 
any  hang  nails  there  already  she'll  make  a 
few — and  she  shears  away  enough  extra 
cuticle  to  cover  quite  a  good-sized  little 
boy.  She  goes  over  you  with  a  bristle  brush, 
and  warms  up  your  nerve  ends  until  you 
tingle  clear  back  to  your  dorsal  fin  and  then 
she  takes  one  of  those  orange  wood  stobbers 
previously  referred  to,  and  goes  on  an  ex 
ploring  expedition  down  under  the  nail, 
looking  for  the  quick.  She  always  finds  it. 
There  is  no  record  of  a  failure  to  find  the 
quick.  Having  found  it  she  proceeds  to 
wake  it  up  and  teach  it  some  parlor  tricks. 
I  may  not  have  set  forth  all  these  various 
details  in  the  exact  order  in  which  they  take 
place,  but  I  know  she  does  them  all.  And 


134         Cob  IS  s 


somewhere  along  about  the  time  when  she 
is  half  way  through  with  the  first  hand  she 
makes  you  put  the  other  hand  in  the  suds. 

Later  on  when  you  have  had  more  prac 
tice  at  this  thing  you  learn  to  wait  for  the 
signal  before  plunging  the  second  hand  into 
the  suds,  but  being  green  on  this  occasion, 
you  are  apt  to  mistake  the  moving  of  the 
crock  of  suds  over  from  the  right  hand  side 
to  the  left  hand  side  as  a  notice  and  to  poke 
your  untouched  hand  right  in  without  fur 
ther  orders,  hoping  to  get  it  softened  up  \\  dl 
so  as  to  save  her  trouble  in  trimming  it  down 
to  a  size  which  will  suit  her.  But  this  is 
wrong  —  this  is  very  wrong,  as  she  tells  you 
promptly,  with  a  pitying  smile  for  your 
ignorance.  Manicure  girls  are  as  careful 
about  boiling  a  hand  as  some  particular  peo 
ple  are  about  boiling  their  eggs  for  breakfast 
of  a  morning.  A  two  minute  hand  is  no 
pleasure  to  her  absolutely  if  she  has  diag 
nosed  your  hand  as  one  calling  for  six  min 
utes,  or  vice  versa.  So,  should  you  err  in  this 
regard  she  will  snatch  the  offending  hand 
out  and  wipe  it  off  and  give  it  back  to  you 
and  tell  you  to  keep  it  in  a  dry  place  until 


Hands  and  Feet        135 

she  calls  for  it.     Manicure  girls  are  very 
funny  that  way. 

Thus  time  passes  on  and  on  and  by  de 
grees  you  begin  to  feel  more  and  more  at 
home.  Your  bashfulness  is  wearing  off. 
The  coherent  power  of  speech  has  returned 
to  you  and  you  have  exchanged  views  with 
her  on  the  relative  merits  of  the  better  known 
brands  of  chewing  gum  and  which  kind 
holds  the  flavor  longest,  and  you  have 
swapped  ideas  on  the  issue  of  whether 
ladies  should  or  should  not  smoke  cigarettes 
in  public  and  she  knows  how  much  your 
stick  pin  cost  you  and  you  know  what  her 
favorite  flower  is.  You  are  getting  along 
fine,  when  all  of  a  sudden  she  dabs  your 
nails  with  a  red  paste  and  then  snatches  up 
a  kind  of  a  polishing  tool  and  ferociously 
rubs  your  fingers  until  they  catch  on  fire. 
Just  when  the  conflagration  threatens  to  be 
come  general  she  stops  using  the  polisher 
and  proceeds  to  cool  down  the  ruins  by 
gently  burnishing  your  nails  against  the 
soft,  pink  palm  of  her  hand.  You  like  this 
better  than  the  other  way.  You  could  ignite 
yourself  by  friction  almost  any  time,  if  you 


A>V)       Cob  IS  s  d  tut  tow y 

got  hold  of  the  right  kind  of  a  chamois  skin 
rubber,  but  this  is  quite  different  and  highly 
soothing.  You  are  beginning  to  really  en 
joy  the  sensation  when  she  roguishly  pats 
the  back  of  your  hand — pitty  pat — as  a  sig 
nal  that  the  operation  is  now  over.  You 
pay  the  check  and  tip  the  lady — tip  her 
fifty  cents  if  you  wish  to  be  regarded  as  a 
lovely  jumpman  or  only  twenty-five  cents 
if  you  are  satisfied  with  being  a  vurry  nice 
fella — and  you  secure  your  hat  and  step 
forth  into  the  open  with  the  feeling  of  one 
who  has  taken  a  trip  into  a  distant  domain 
and  on  the  whole  has  rather  enjoyed  it. 

You  stand  in  the  sunlight  and  waggle 
\«)ur  fingers  and  you  are  struck  with  the 
desirable  glitter  that  flits  from  finger  tip  to 
finger  tip  like  a  helcograph  winking  on  a 
mountain  top.  It  is  indeed  a  pleasing  spec 
tacle.  You  decide  that  hereafter  you  will 
always  glitter  so.  It  is  cheaper  than  wearing 
diamonds  and  much  more  refined,  and  so 
you  take  good  care  of  your  fingers  all  that 
day  and  carefully  refrain  from  dipping  them 
in  the  brine  while  engaged  in  the  well  known 


Hands  and  Feet        137 

indoor  sport  of  spearing  for  dill  pickles  at 
the  business  men's  lunch. 

But  the  next  morning  when  you  wake  up 
the  desirable  glitter  is  gone.  You  only 
glimmer  dully — your  ringers  do  not  sparkle 
and  dazzle  and  scintillate  as  they  did.  As 
Francois  Villon,  the  French  poet  would 
undoubtedly  have  said  had  manicures  been 
known  at  the  time  he  was  writing  his  poems, 
"Where  are  the  manicures  of  yesterday?" 
instead  of  making  it,  "Where  are  the  snows 
of  yesteryear?"  there  being  no  answer  ready 
for  either  question,  except  that  the  mani 
cures  of  yesterday  like  the  snows  of  yester 
year  are  never  there  when  you  start  looking 
for  them.  They  have  just  naturally  got  up 
and  gone  away,  leaving  no  forwarding  ad 
dress. 

You  have  now  been  launched  upon  your 
career  as  a  manicuree.  You  never  get  over 
it.  You  either  get  married  and  your  wife 
does  your  nails  for  you,  thus  saving  you 
large  sums  of  money,  but  failing  to  impart 
the  high  degree  of  polish  and  the  spice  of 
romance  noticed  in  connection  with  the 


138       Cob  IS  s 


same  job  when  done  away  from  home,  or 
you  continue  to  patronize  the  regular  es 
tablishments  and  become  known  in  time  as 
Polished  Percival,  the  Pet  of  the  Manicure 
Parlor.  But  in  either  event  your  hands 
which  once  were  hands  and  nothing  more, 
have  become  a  source  of  added  trouble  and 
expense  to  you. 

Speaking  of  hands  naturally  brings  one 
to  the  subject  of  feet,  which  was  intended 
originally  to  be  the  theme  for  the  last  half 
of  this  chapter,  but  unfortunately  I  find 
I  have  devoted  so  much  space  to  your  hands 
that  there  is  but  little  room  left  for  your 
feet  and  so  far  as  your  feet  are  concerned, 
we  must  content  ourselves  on  this  occasion 
with  a  few  general  statements. 

Feet,  I  take  it,  speaking  both  from  ex 
perience  and  observation,  are  even  more 
trouble  to  us  than  hands  are.  There  are 
still  a  good  many  of  us  left  who  go  through 
life  without  doing  anything  much  for  our 
hands  but  with  our  feet  it  is  different.  They 
thrust  themselves  upon  us  so  to  speak,  de 
manding  care  and  attention.  This  goes  for 


Hands  and  Feet        139 

all  sizes  and  all  ages  of  feet.  From  the  time 
you  are  a  small  boy  and  suffer  from  stone 
bruises  in  the  summer  and  chilblains  in  the 
winter,  on  through  life  you're  beset  with 
corns  and  callouses  and  falling  of  the  in 
step  and  all  the  other  ills  that  feet  are  heir 
to. 

The  rich  limp  with  the  gout,  the  moder 
ately  well  to  do  content  themselves  with  an 
active  ingrown  nail  or  so,  and  the  poor  man 
goes  out  and  drops  an  iron  casting  on  his 
toe.  Nearly  every  male  who  lives  to  reach 
the  voting  age  has  a  period  of  mental  weak 
ness  in  his  youth  when  he  wears  those 
pointed  shoes  that  turn  up  at  the  ends,  like 
sleigh  runners;  and  spends  the  rest  of  his 
life  regretting  it.  Feet  are  certainly  un 
grateful  things.  I  might  say  that  they  are 
proverbially  ungrateful.  You  do  for  them 
and  they  do  you.  You  get  one  corn,  hard 
or  soft,  cured  up  or  removed  bodily  and  a 
whole  crowd  of  its  relatives  come  to  take 
its  place.  I  imagine  that  Nature  intended 
we  should  go  barefooted  and  is  now  get 
ting  even  with  us  because  we  didn't.  Our 


140        Cohlfs  Anatomy 

poor,  painful  feet  go  with  us  through  all 
the  years  and  every  step  in  life  is  marked 
by  a  pang  of  some  sort.  And  right  on  up 
to  the  end  of  our  days,  our  feet  are  getting 
more  infirm  and  more  troublesome  and 
more  crotchety  and  harder  to  bear  with  all 
the  time.  How  many  are  there  right  now 
who  have  one  foot  in  the  grave  and  the 
other  at  the  chiropodist's?  Thousands,  I 
reckon. 

Napoleon  said  an  army  traveled  on  its 
stomach.  I  don't  blame  the  army,  far  from 
it;  I've  often  wished  I  could  travel  that  way 
myself,  and  I've  no  doubt  so  has  every  other 
man  who  ever  crowded  a  number  nine  and 
three-quarters  foot  into  a  number  eight  pa 
tent-leather  shoe,  and  then  went  to  call  on 
friends  residing  in  a  steam-heated  apart 
ment.  As  what  man  has  not?  Once  the 
green-corn  dance  was  an  exclusive  thing 
with  the  Sioux  Indians,  but  it  may  now  be 
witnessed  when  one  man  steps  on  another 
man's  toes  in  a  crowd. 

We  are  accustomed  to  make  fun  of  the 
humble  worm  of  the  (lust  but  in  one  respect 


Hands  and  Feet       141 

the  humble  worm  certainly  has  it  on  us. 
He  goes  through  existence  without  any 
hands  and  any  feet  to  bother  him.  Indeed 
in  this  regard  I  can  think  of  but  one  crea 
ture  in  all  creation  who  is  worse  off  than 
we  poor  humans  are.  That  is  the  lowly  ear 
wig.  Think  of  being  an  ear  wig,  that  suf 
fers  from  fallen  arches  himself  and  has  a 
wife  that  suffers  from  cold  feet! 


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